Knowing who the best customers are, what they buy, how they buy and when they will buy is the basis for decisions that impact sales and loyalty. This attentive look at the consumer gains strength in a scenario of intensified integration between the physical and digital points of sale, allowing brands to offer personalized and connected experiences.
The use of Artificial Intelligence and advanced data analysis allows us to mine information about preferences, purchase history and behaviors, reaching levels of individualized personalization. “Data is the new sales clerks, but on a gigantic scale. AI allows us to provide personalized service on a large scale. With data, we can make recommendations for products, service and distribution by clusters of groups of customers”, stated Fábio Faccio, CEO of Renner, during the Lide Retail Seminar, held this Tuesday, the 24th, in São Paulo.
Renner currently operates with 686 stores, 20 million customers and revenues of around R$18 billion, distributed across brands such as Renner, Camicado, Youcom, Ashua, as well as Repassa, a circular fashion company, and its own financial company Realize.
According to Faccio, AI allows us to predict the sales of each product, by store, even considering variations such as size, model and local preferences. “We have a new SKU every day. Knowing how much each item will sell in each city, to which customer and in each size is quite challenging. That’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in, to bring assertiveness to the sales forecast by item, by person, by city. Then, we advance the recommendation by customer group and by customers”, he explains.
This intelligence also extends to operations. “Each employee has in the palm of their hand, on their smartphone, information about what was sold, what needs to be replenished and which customer should be prioritized for service. This generates more productivity, a better experience and more operational efficiency”, highlights Faccio.
Physical and digital retail in transformation
Just like in fashion, the construction materials sector has been advancing in the use of Artificial Intelligence to transform its operations. At Quero-Quero, for example, AI is applied both on the commercial front, with personalized offers, dynamic pricing and inventory management, and in the financial area, which represents a significant portion of the business.
The technology allows mapping customer profiles, assessing risks, automating collection processes and making decisions on a scale that would previously have been unfeasible. “What used to take days, we now do in minutes. In the financial sector, for example, we work on the collection side, with organization, profile survey and work class”, says Peter Furukawa, president of Lojas Quero Quero.
A graduate in computer science in the USA, Furukawa highlighted that retail is now entering a new phase: that of AI agents. “For me, this is going to be an even bigger change than it was when we started working with data. When you start talking about AI agents, which is someone who goes there and makes things happen for you, then everything changes. You start to think about the store operation in a different way,” he says.
Furukawa believes that this new phase will transform points of sale and accelerate integration with digital, freeing up time for teams to focus on human service and building relationships with customers.
“In practice, what happened? The stores that managed to become omnichannel, that understood this opportunity, grew even more. They continued to have their physical stores, even opened more stores, but they also created digital channels, selling directly to customers, without losing the strength of the physical store,” he says.
Image: Gabriel Okawa e Evandro Macedo/LIDE
*This text was translated by AI
