February 2023

How To Use ChatGPT For Retail

by Nafim Talukder | Feb 23, 2023 | Industry Tips, Industry Trends

If you’re not familiar with Chat GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), you’re missing out! It’s an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that’s been making waves lately, with people finding all kinds of creative ways to use it. Here’s a quick overview of what it’s all about.

Typing in "How to use ChatGPT for retail purposes" on the ChatGPT prompt input text box

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT logo

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence program that’s been trained to understand and respond to human language. Think of it as a really smart robot that talks to people through text messages. If you ask it a question or task, and it will check its database of knowledge to give you the best answer or solution. As more and more people use it, ChatGPT, powered by AI, becomes smarter.

Some well-known brands are already using the AI technology behind ChatGPT to support their retail businesses. For example, H&M created an AI style assistant which helps customers pick clothes that fit their style and budget. Another example is Domino’s (the pizza chain). They have created an AI which allows customers to place orders, track their delivery, and get answers to frequently asked questions.

The AI technology that ChatGPT has made mainstream will continue to grow. The best part is that ChatGPT is still cost-effective so independent retailers can also get in on the action.

How to use ChatGPT as a retailer

ChatGPT can automate customer service queries, give personalized product advice, create targeted marketing messages, and generate reports on customer behaviour and trends. With ChatGPT, retailers can use the latest AI tech to streamline their operations and make informed decisions. Here are a few of the ways it’s already being used today:

A. Creating retail marketing

A stylized image of a robot looking at a phone with a target icon next to them. — Source

One of the easiest ways to use ChatGPT is for retail marketing. For example, you can use ChatGPT to generate ideas, create drafts, and optimize written content.

1. Content creation

ChatGPT can be used to quickly generate unique and engaging content for retail stores. For example, it can be used to create product descriptions, promotional materials, and more. By leveraging the power of AI, retailers can create content that is tailored to their target audience, resulting in improved engagement and clicks. Businesses can also use ChatGPT to analyze customer feedback and utilize the insights to create more effective marketing materials.

If you have a social media account for your store, try using ChatGPT to generate a caption for your next post. For example if you are posting an instagram post for Valentine’s Day, you could ask the following on ChatGPT: “instagram caption for a valentine’s day post”. ChatGPT will then automatically create something appropriate for you.

Prompting ChatGPT to generate a retail instagram caption for Valentine's day

While ChatGPT can help you save a lot of time, it’s important to remember that the answers may be too generic if you don’t give enough detail in your request. The best way to improve this is to add more context to your request by adding something like “from a health store to its audience” so that the AI can try to personalize the caption to your business.

Prompting ChatGPT to generate a retail instagram caption for Valentine's day with additional context — See how much better that is?

Expert tip: Whenever possible, provide ChatGPT with as much context as possible for the best results

2. Getting customer feedback about your store

ChatGPT is a great tool that can help you learn more about what your customers are saying about your products or services on Google and other platforms. It can help you identify areas where you can make improvements and provide a better overall experience for your customers. For instance, if customers are consistently giving your store low ratings due to slow delivery times, this data can help you take action and make changes to your delivery process so that your customers are getting their orders in a timely manner.

To conduct this analysis with ChatGPT, you’ll first need to collect all the review texts from your review platforms. You can then paste all the text into ChatGPT and prompt it to “conduct a sentiment analysis”. The data can help you spot where you need to make changes, such as better customer service, better product quality and faster delivery. After finding areas that need improvement, you can use ChatGPT to create messages/campaigns aimed at addressing the issues and improving customer satisfaction.

B. Retail customer service

You can use ChatGPT to improve the customer service your store provides.

1. Responding to customers

Retailers can use ChatGPT to respond quickly and accurately to customer inquiries. It can help automate customer service request and even provide personalized product recommendations based on customer needs. This can help save time and money for customer service teams, allowing them to focus on more complex customer issues.

If responding to customer messages on your digital platforms is no issue, you could always consider using ChatGPT to edit your responses before sending them off. Ensuring that you’re using the best grammar, tone, and language can go a long way—making sure you sound as professional as possible.

2. FAQs

Flat icon of message bubbles with the one in the center being labelled "FAQ" — Source

Retailers can use ChatGPT to quickly and accurately answer frequently asked questions (FAQs). This can be a huge time-saver for customer service teams as it can help answer customer questions without the need for a human representative. You can use ChatGPT to create a library of FAQs that customers can search through to find their answers. Store owners can also use ChatGPT to refine and update existing FAQs as needed. Plus, it can be used to generate personalized, targeted responses for customers based on their queries. This helps ensure that customers are getting the most accurate and helpful answers possible.

C. Other creative uses

Lastly, here are two other handy uses for ChatGPT.

1. Data cleanup

Making sure your data looks uniform to create reports or run analyses has never been easier. With ChatGPT you can provide it some data then ask it to make sure things such as format are consistent across the board. For example if you have a list of dates you need to paste into a spreadsheet but they’re all in different formats, you can ask ChatGPT to convert all of the dates to a format of your preference. Take some time and think about how you can use ChatGPT to save your time when doing administrative work.

Expert tip: When working with data, be sure to think about whether there are any privacy concerns. While ChatGPT can be very helpful, it is important to consider any regulatory or policy requirements before you share any personal or confidential information.

2. Translations

Finally, you can use ChatGPT to translate your writing. This will help you easily communicate with all of your customers. If your store is in a bilingual community and you are not as a confident in one of the languages, you can use ChatGPT to translate your store messages, signs, website content, social media content, etc.

Prompting ChatGPT to translate a message into Spanish for a Fruit Retailer

What’s great about ChatGPT’s translations compared to current translators (e.g., Google translate) is that the AI is able to understand and translate expressions, slang, and other subtle parts of languages that traditional translators struggle with. What’s also amazing about ChatGPT is that it will consider the context and tone of the phrase being translated which is super important in getting an accurate translation. If you need to use translation tools in your retail operations, look no further than ChatGPT.

Conclusion

AI is going to continue to shake up the world of business. We highly recommend that you consider trying out ChatGPT now while there is still free access as we predict they’ll become more of a standard business tool in the coming years. We’re excited to see how AI tools will help retailers work less while selling more!

Besides AI, here are some 6 retail marketing strategies that are and will continue to shake up things in the retail industry. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated in all things retail!

6 Retail Marketing Strategies For The Next Decade

by Nafim Talukder | Feb 14, 2023 | Industry Tips, Industry Trends, Marketing Tips, Popular Articles

There is an art to marketing your brand to retail shoppers. Because marketing is constantly changing, you need to adapt your marketing strategy as customer habits change over time. Here are 6 retail marketing strategies that will shape retail marketing over the next decade.

1. Personalized Experiences

A growing marketing strategy is the use of personalized ads and experience. 80% of shoppers reported that they’re more likely to do business with a brand that offers a personalized experience. Additionally, almost half of most customers want to see ads targeted at their interests.

Digital illustration of personalized marketing — (*Source*)

So what is personalized experience? This generally means customizing promotions and discounts to the wants of a specific customer versus a generic message to all customers. Understanding the individual tastes and wants of your customer has never been easier. Modern POS systems allow you to track customer info, as well as their purchasing habits which you can use to create personalized experiences for them. For example, if a regular customer often buys colorful socks, but they have not made a purchase recently, you could send them a personalized in-store offer related to socks to encourage them to visit the store.

2. Visual search

Google’s image search is going to be a game changer in retail marketing. Searchers can upload images onto Google and reverse-search them, finding where others have uploaded the image on the internet. Give it a try here.

Google's reverse image search — Make sure you press on the camera icon to search by image

This can allow people to see images of a product online, save it, then find easily find stores that sell the item. There is a reason why Gartner said that visual search is one of 5 technologies that will have a great impact on the world of digital marketing in the years to come. It can improve nearly every stage of the buyer’s journey. We predict that marketing strategies that use product images and content with visual search will become common practice within the next 5 years.

Google's visual search results — An example of what Google’s visual search results look like. On the left is the image used for the search, on the right are the results. Notice how the matching images shows the price since its an e-commerce link.

3. Strategizing for featured snippets

Featured snippets are short descriptions on websites that help you show up at the top of a Google search. The purpose of a featured snippet is to help users find a quick answer. You have probably experienced it before when you Googled a question and saw a quick answer at the top of the search results. That was a featured snippet.

This feature of Google is especially helpful as attention spans continue to decrease in recent years. Currently average attention spans are only 8 seconds long. This means it is essential to catch someone’s attention quick, or risk losing it altogether.

Featured snippets help reach catch audiences’ attentions quickly, however it can be difficult to get featured snippets. Check out this article on how you can optimize content for featured snippets. It’s worth mentioning that TAKU Retail is the first retail management software to be a trusted Google Partner. TAKU can help businesses appear higher up on Google search results and Maps when people search for you online.

4. ChatGPT and AI Chatbots

Art of a robot behind a phone. On the phone display there is a mockup of a chat between two entities.

You have likely heard about how people are now using ChatGPT to search for information or to learn. But there are an increasing number of ways that AI chatbots can help retailers save time and money including:

AI-generated marketing content. With access to so much data, AI chatbots are an easy way to quickly write content for social media or even the text for marketing campaigns on the fly. Think less writer’s block, and more engaging posts.
Writing standardized company policies. While you would still want to have legal policies (e.g. your privacy policy) reviewed by a lawyer, you can draft general company, handbooks or order policies with ChatGPT in several minutes.
Researching product trends for purchasing. ChatGPT’s knowledge is limited at this point, but the advantage of AI is that it will get smarter over time. It’s ability to analyze data from millions of websites makes it more likely to highlight product trends for you faster than searching for them online.
Scheduling tasks, and overall time management. ChatGPT can help you create a daily work schedule and handle time-consuming tasks including things such as performance reports, shift schedules, etc.
Solving problems. Because of the knowledge it has access to, ChatGPT is very good at generating ideas, drafting business plans, and estimating the costs to solve problems for your business. You should still always get secondary advice, but ChatGPT is a good starting point, even if only to check that you’re on the right path.

5. Accessible and inclusive content

Example of organized web content — Check out Zapier’s guide to accessible web content

This is one of the most underrated of the 6 retail marketing strategies we are touching on today. It’s important for marketing content to be of quality, but what’s the point if it’s not easily understood? Making content more accessible could include adjustable font sizes (or more legible ones), more use of images to convey information for cognitive or reading impairments, and transcripts for videos/podcasts to name a few. The goal is to ensure that as many people as possible can actually engage with your content, and hopefully understand it. Reducing barriers to your content is key and will ensure you can maximize your reach.

6. Metaverse marketing

Read our guide on metaverse shopping here

If you’ve read our metaverse blog post, you’ll know that more and more people are embracing the digital world. Technology will continue to change how humans interact with each other, extending to how they interact with businesses as well. This is why so many retailers are investing into marketing on the metaverse. Read our metaverse post to learn more about how augmented reality (AR) is being leveraged by big brands such as Ikea to enhance their customers’ shopping experiences.

The next decade is going to be an interesting time for marketers and entrepreneurs alike. As new strategies for promoting your business will continue to grab people’s attention, the promotional game is surely to continue to change. Make sure you’re staying ahead of the curve by subscribing to our blog.