How AI is Changing the User Shopping Experience with Omri Katz

I sat down with Omri Katz, CEO at Dialogue to discuss how AI is changing the E-commerce industry.

Ishan Pandey: Hi Omri, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind Dialogue?

Omri Katz: Dialogue is a SaaS-based platform that uses AI to help brands and retailers enhance their online shopping experience and increase their KPIs. 

The corporation was born from the understanding that there is a real gap between the physical and online experience in terms of customer experience. Technology can bridge this gap. 

Brands invest a lot in user acquisition, but when it comes to investing in their online assets we see a drop in resources and attention. With the rise of coronavirus cases in the USA and Europe, we believe that now there is going to be a systematic change in how people shop.

The main reason is that technological solutions are just not cost-effective for most merchants, mostly SMBs. They require expertise, high maintenance and are pricey. 

We are solving this problem every day. We have created a unique platform that automates the entire process for the merchant, it is very low-touch and it’s able to offer high-end technological abilities that were saved up until now to the enterprise level brands and retailers.

Omri Katz: Harnessing the capabilities of AI, especially the latest development in Machine Learning, we are able to look at users’ actions and preferences and cross those data points to find hidden patterns to better predict their intent. Our algorithms use a lot of data to make calculations and conclusions that then can be translated into immediate actions. If you are able to put together a lot of separate data points into a robust AI engine you will find the hidden patterns that will get you one step closer to predicting what each individual user is looking for.

From there you can influence the customer’s online experience in terms of website navigation, product discovery, personalized campaigns and optimized pricing and coupons. As a company collects more data points the machine learning algorithm is able to provide a more accurate outcome.

Omri Katz: When the data is gathered, AI is able to create sales-driven messages with engaging content that takes the user’s experience on the website to a whole new level.

You can then use AI to also adjust the message to the user intent and drive the users to take actions based on their intent. 

Messaging is another way of resonating the user’s intent and to create a better & more personalized experience in real-time that can uplift the bottom line for the merchant. 

Ishan Pandey: How does machine learning help in providing intelligent product recommendations? 

Omri Katz: A user session in an E-commerce store is less than 4 minutes on average. For merchants that have hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of products, it is a real challenge to offer the most relevant products for each user in this very short time. If a merchant is able to theoretically offer the most relevant products to each user throughout their short online journey then it’s a win-win. 

The customer received a great experience and the merchant converted the user. Amazon, eBay, and the rest of the industry’s giants have perfected their product recommendations and they use their enormous database to create better optimized AI models. For SMBs it’s a lot harder, since the data is limited and most of the time unorganized, they need to find other ways to use AI to do a good job. 

Omri Katz: In order to exceed the customer's expectations, the first step is to understand their needs and intentions. The idea is to combine knowledge from the psychology world with the tech product in order to find the hidden patterns in the customer’s behavior.

Once a brand understands its customer's deep intentions the whole process of online shopping becomes much more customized and personalized.

The key is the combination of psychology and technology. 

Every e-commerce brand has to put the mission of understanding its customers on the top of their priorities. AI works on harnessing data and the ability to learn from it. When using AI-powered algorithms the e-commerce website is able to learn the user from every action of his journey and build a “profile” for the customer. Learning from this “profile”,  the website can personalize the user’s experience.

Omri Katz: It is evident that the concept of personalization is becoming more and more predominant these days. Every customer expects a rich and customized shopping experience. When customers receive a personalized experience, there will be higher engagement with relevant content, more time spent on the website and as a direct result an increase in sales.

Ishan Pandey: Please share some case studies with us about how AI-powered products help businesses get conversion online?

Omri Katz: We have multiple case studies showing conversion rate uplift, session time increase and ARPU (average revenue per user) uplift, however, we cannot publicly disclose all of them.

Dialogue has been shown to improve the aforementioned parameters by anywhere from 10% to 40%. You can refer to a case study we did with SABON.

Ishan Pandey: According to you, in the future, what new business intelligence approaches to AI implementation are we going to see in E-commerce? 

Omri Katz: According to me, chatbots will become much better over time. There are big companies that are trying to solve customer support using pure AI (without human interventions) and it’s not quite there yet. AR and VR are also fields in which merchants will be able to get closer to a real-life experience for their online users. But eventually, you need to realize that online shopping is fundamentally different than the traditional brick & mortar, technology can bridge this gap to some extent, but it will probably still look and feel different for better and worse.