Indian Retailer abof personalizes online shopping experience with IBM Watson and Cloud

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Apr 10, 2017, 09:15 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., April 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Aditya Birla Online Fashion (abof), leading online fashion retailer and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new shopping experience to deliver a personalized and convenient shopping experience powered by IBM Watson and Cloud.

Abof is an Indian online fashion retailer from the Aditya Birla Group. The company sells apparel, footwear and accessories for men and women targeting the millennial consumers. Abof's goal is to provide a highly convenient and distinctive customer experience, driven by a strong technology backbone and 100% curated merchandise.

In a first for India's retail market, abof customers can use natural language questions within abof's enhanced eCommerce platform to receive greater personalization and product recommendations.

With this new discovery tool, shoppers can now interact and ask natural language questions about abof's unique product assortment, and then receive custom responses to their inquiries. For example, a customer could type, "where can I find a red floral dress?" or type a combination of price and product inquiry such as, "show me black shoes below INR 2000." These inquiries are recognized and understood by the system on abof's website to recommend top matches to the shopper.

The customer engagement is conducted through a simple question and answer interface leveraging Watson's Natural Language Classifier, as well as Retrieve and Rank delivered on the IBM Cloud. IBM Global Business Services and IBM Research worked with abof to introduce the service and help create a more engaging and intuitive shopping experience for customers.

"The business of fashion has experienced extreme change in recent years," said Prashant Gupta, President and Chief Executive Officer, abof.com. "Our aim is to create seamless and convenient shopping experiences for our customers in the digital world. This is a start of our cognitive journey and we plan to implement more Watson-enabled solutions in the future to continue our momentum."

"India is the fastest growing e-commerce market and expected to reach $64 billion by 2021. With this exponential growth, India's retailers need to drive deeper understanding, better engagement, and leverage data more efficiently to enhance the customers' shopping experience," said Steve Laughlin, General Manager, IBM Global Consumer Industries. "With IBM Watson, abof can make the customer shopping experience more personalized, informed and enjoyable, similar to the engaging service shoppers could get in a physical store."

Today's news builds on the strong collaboration between abof and IBM to provide an enhanced personalized shopping experience to abof customers. In 2016, IBM provided abof with a scalable e-commerce platform, seamless order fulfillment options, and innovative customer engagement features such as a 3D virtual trial room. Powered by IBM and integrated technology from business partner Metail, the feature enables customers to input their body measurements and virtually try on any apparel before placing an order. Today, these combined capabilities, and the new cognitive fashion assistant can help abof create end-to-end personalized shopping experiences that cultivate truly unique buying moments and ensures prompt delivery of each item, which over time results in increased brand loyalty and conversions.

About abof.com
abof.com is a go-to online destination for the best in fashion shopping, news and trend watching! abof.com has got the most trendy and celebrity-inspired apparel, footwear and accessories that belong in every fashionista's wardrobe in India. If one wants to get famous, abof assures fast deliveries of the best in branded clothing! Start shopping now!

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About IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
Watson represents a new era in computing called cognitive computing, where systems understand the world in a way more similar to humans: through senses, learning, and experience. Watson continuously learns from previous interactions, gaining in value and knowledge over time. With the help of Watson, organizations are harnessing the power of cognitive computing to transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and solve important challenges.

As part of IBM's strategy to accelerate the growth of cognitive computing, Watson is open to the world, allowing a growing community of developers, students, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts to easily tap into the most advanced and diverse cognitive computing platform available today. Watson solutions are being built, used and deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries.

For more information on IBM Watson, visit: ibm.com/watson. Join the conversation at #ibmwatson.

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SOURCE IBM