For retailers, the holidays are where the money is made. However, this season puts enormous pressure on supply chain managers and analysts to ensure products are available and that everything moves smoothly through the season. Even with the best planning, regardless of the time of the year, sometimes supply does not meet demand, especially when there are new or unexpected product trends.
Retailers need to be prepared for out-of-stocks while still meeting customer expectations and sales goals. One way to compensate for unpredictable sell-outs or supply chain bumps is by providing relevant suggestions for other products. About 78% of shoppers interact with product Opens a new window recommendationsOpens a new window always or often, and nearly two-thirds of consumers say every visit or often they buy recommended items they didn’t initially plan on buying. Recommendations are one of the best ways to keep customers satisfied and sales numbers high, regardless of the state of the supply chain.
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Here are four tips to ensure a customer checks out with a full cart, even if their preferred item isn’t available:
1. Turn To AI To Solve Out-of-Stock Woes
It’s impossible for merchandisers to curate every recommendation manually, especially when you think about the tens of thousands of orders that pour in every hour during the busy shopping season. Advanced machine learning (ML) relieves your merchandising team from spending valuable time analyzing results and manually fixing rules so they can execute more strategic tactics. You can instantly show your customers relevant recommendations based on their behavior and preferences with an experience that would take data analysts days to research, adjust, and deliver.
2. Understand Shopper Intent and Priorities
Collect real-time signals from your customers, including search queries, add-to-carts, and clickthroughs, and apply machine learning to recommend the most relevant items. The system will continue to learn over time about the individual consumer and the behavior of different segments. Maybe an individual consumer prioritizes the color of their Bombas socks over the pattern. If you’re out of stock of the specific color and pattern combo they want, ML knows to boost product recommendations that prioritize the color they’re after to ensure they don’t leave empty-handed.
3. Equip Customer Service Agents With the Best Information
The contact center offers a new opportunity for retailers, assisted by AI, to provide intelligent recommendations to substitute unexpectedly out-of-stock products. In a recent survOpens a new window eyOpens a new window , just over half of contact center employees revealed that they view upselling and cross-selling as a part of their job, and consumers are likely to appreciate the suggestions. About 50% of respondents from the survey who have been offered recommendations from contact center agents said they would purchase additional items. Companies that can integrate product availability, consumer preferences, and customer support can create compounding value across the entire organization to drive both customer satisfaction and increase revenue, despite supply chain challenges.
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4. Connect the Experience Across Channels
According to Forrester, only 33% of organizations strongly agree that they provide experiences that are relevant and connected. Shoppers browse in-store, research on their computers, and purchase on mobile — they’re not thinking about “omnichannel†when they’re switching between social to email to store to the website. Connect shopper signals across every digital and analog touchpoint to curate experiences that learn from every action before, regardless of the channel.
2022 will be a year of maintenance and integration. In the long term, online retailers will be working to maintain the digital commerce gains made during the online shift in the pandemic and keep these new shoppers loyal. In the shorter term, we’ll see a focus on technologies that help retailers mitigate ongoing supply chain disruption and better merchandise and personalize the consumer offering amidst stock shortages.
Have you ever faced an “out-of-stock†issue on your shopping portal? How did you overcome it? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .