Elevate the shopping experience

Microsoft Cloud for Retail helps you improve the shopping experience for customers both in-store and online. Create personalized e-commerce experiences, optimize your advertising, enhance customer service, increase multichannel engagement, and automate store processes.

Intelligent stores

Intelligent stores help you protect your revenue from fraud by using AI to identify patterns. With intelligent stores, you can maximize sales by optimizing in-store customer and product signals.

By optimizing in-store customer and product signals, you can gain a single view into insights:

• Predict customer and operational needs with an intelligent view of the customer informed by AI and analytics.
• Monitor and interpret online engagement with heatmaps, high-definition anonymized recordings, and more.
• Maximize the value of your data by unifying data integration, warehousing, and analytics.
• Enhance in-store experiences and operational efficiency with predictive models that optimize store layout, product catalog, shelf placement, and inventory.

Unified commerce

Unified commerce helps you connect operations, enhance and personalize customer experiences, and connect physical and digital storefronts.

By engaging across channels, you can help increase engagement and drive conversions across channels:

• Operate on a flexible, unified commerce platform that allows you to connect digital, in-store, and back-office operations, with the ability to expand and grow to fit business needs.
• Unify physical and digital storefronts, providing a single view of transactions, observational data, and behavioral data for customers.
• Access real-time omnichannel sales and cost data to centrally manage promotions across all channels, and track inventory across channels to make informed inventory supply decisions with advanced analytics and machine learning.
• Predict customer demand with actionable insights provided by historical sales and purchase data.
• Use a modern retail POS & AI-driven recommendations to enhance and personalize customer experience and help them discover what’s relevant to them.

Real-time personalization

Real-time personalization helps drive conversion and make it easier for customers to find what they're looking for. Additionally, you can offer more relevant, personalized options with the help of generative AI.

By enabling personalized recommendations and search results, you make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for:

• Increase basket size and upsell across all channels with hyper-relevant recommendations and Next Best Action.
• Provide next-gen options like “shop this look” and “bring the look” options.
• Lead shoppers to more relevant search results with semantic search capabilities that understand their intent.
• Deliver the right content at the right moment on the right channel with AI-powered images, offers, and content that improve marketing effectiveness and engagement.
• Optimize content for customer engagement with A/B testing.

Digital advertising solutions

Digital advertising solutions optimize your campaigns across channels, find new customers, increase current customer loyalty, and build stronger customer relationships.

By driving growth, you can engage new and loyal customers:

• Optimize your campaigns across channels from awareness to conversion.
• Optimize return on ad spend and drive incremental sales.
• Engage customers directly on their channels of choice and build stronger customer relationships.

Seamless customer service

Seamless customer service eliminates problems before they arise, tailor customer engagements, and free up live agents to manage complex problems.

By using intelligent and automated customer service tools, you can provide smarter services:

• Integrate your chatbots with the products and services you use everyday allowing it to look up records, hand off conversations to live agents, and call APIs.
• Create personalized conversations with distinct articles using natural language understanding and entity extraction.
• Monitor and improve your chatbot’s performance using AI and data-driven insights
• Tailor customer engagement by providing at-a-glance customer history, and utilize AI to classify, prioritize, and assign customers across all channels to the most qualified agent
• Elevate agent effectiveness with tools to work across multiple open cases, resolve issues quickly, and to identify areas in need of attention.
• Provide self-service support with virtual agents, knowledge base portals, and community support forums.

Solutions to help you take advantage of these capabilities