Episode: How AI Is Personalizing the Retail Customer Journey

**Prasanna Vaidya** (0:06)
Welcome to GydeBites, I'm Prasanna, your host. Best retail experiences, they don't feel like AI or any other technology as such. They simply feel effortless. You just find right product faster. The recommendations make more sense, and every interaction feels like more relevant than the last one. But what does it take to deliver this kind of experience, and where AI is creating the impact across customer journey when it comes to retail? To answer these questions and more, I'm joined today by Kuntal Malia. She's a Chief Data and Insights Officer at Metro Brands Limited.
With over 25 years of experience, Kuntal has led AI and data initiatives across startups, large enterprises, and more.
Her work mostly focuses on customer insights, merchandising, demand forecasting, and developing personalized retail experiences. Kuntal, it's a pleasure to have you here. I'm so glad.

**Kuntal Malia** (1:06)
Thank you for having me, Prasanna. 25 years suddenly makes me feel very old. But I think luckily the field is so exciting. It keeps me young at heart and on my toes. So glad to share what I know and always learning experience for me as well.

**Prasanna Vaidya** (1:22)
All right. So Kuntal, let's get going immediately. What does personalization mean in modern retail?

**Kuntal Malia** (1:29)
You know, personalization, as you kind of indicated for a very long time, has meant from the user side as well as the retailer side, what is the product that you should get next? You know, it's a recommendation as we think about it, right? So whether it's on Amazon or whether it's at Mintra, wherever you are, you're seeing like what product is recommended. We're moving now towards a point where it's more about next best action, right? What is the right thing for me to do with this customer at this point in time, given that we're building towards a relationship. We are in a journey, we're not a transaction. So maybe the right answer is that yes, I should show you this product, but maybe the right answer is also that I should just tell you how to take care of what you have.
I don't look at every single interaction as a selling point. So I think that's one big shift that's happening in the retail space and AI enables that aspect. The other thing that's happening is personalization of the kind that we're talking about used to be mostly in the domain of online, as the ability to recognize you, has the ability to operate accordingly. If you let's say had this kind of personalization at the store level, it was often by chance and not necessarily design that you could enforce, because there's a human variable that is involved. Now, we're at a stage where this intentionality of personalization can come in at different touch points of the customer in retail. And I think that's what makes things very exciting. We're able to kind of move beyond just the online experience and see, okay, how do you truly build a relationship with the customer?

**Prasanna Vaidya** (3:11)
And it would be really great if retail stores or brands, online brands, can just tell me, okay, this is how you take care of your MacBook Pro, or this is how you take care of your iPhones, and furniture that you have bought from us last month, and so on. That would be a really great way to engage with the customers and also provide the personalization so that it really helps customers to use the products better.

**Kuntal Malia** (3:36)
And so, I mean, if you think about it, right, if you think about your own experience as a customer, your brand affinity increases when there is a moment that happens, let's say at the store, or maybe it could be at even an online scenario, where there is something which has gone over and above the product. And that's when you say, okay, you know what, I'm going to come back to the store, right? I'm going to interact. So it's whether the store associate has been helpful in terms of how he or she has gone about everything, whether maybe a return that you wanted was processed very smoothly in a way. That's when you will say, okay, I'm going to go ahead and do, I'm going to go ahead and give this brand my business or this retailer my business. So it's the others which kind of come into place.

**Prasanna Vaidya** (4:18)
Sure. Sure. And you mentioned a little bit about AI, but how AI actually driving this personalization? Can we just double click on that?

**Kuntal Malia** (4:26)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think some of the things that have led to personalization have existed for a while. So let's say your collaborative filtering, your predictive analytics, your segmentation, your ability to understand who's going to churn, etc. All of that has been there for a while.