In the beauty industry, chatbots are seen to solve much more than tangible problems. During the initial phase, its usage was straightforward and cautious – Personalized communication, 24/7 availability, product inquiry, and reaching the target audience.
But as the beauty world is much more personalized than any other industry, the big brands started leveraging chatbot in a lot more personal aspects.
1. Personalized Product Recommendation
The major highlight is the personalized product recommendation.
While the industry offers a wide range of products, consumers often fail to understand what suits them and how to use the product correctly. Here is where the role of chatbot becomes important. By personally communicating with the user, the bots are able to suggest the right product for them.
A beauty brand AVA recommends beauty products by getting answers through a set of questionnaire, which in the end leads to personalized suggestions.
Source: AVA Beauty
Ava helps in discovering the best products for unique skin care needs, powered by artificial intelligence and human expertise.
They are a team of licensed skin care advisors and dermatologists who are just a single text away to provide you with highly accurate, personalized recommendations.
2. Chatbots Serving As A Virtual Makeup Assistant
Currently, everyone who even likes to put on a little makeup, look for inspirations from the celebrities. The chatbot can help these people replicate the look by interacting with the users conversationally, suggesting cosmetic products used by these celebrities, after which they offer coupons for the promoted product.
CoverGirl has created a chatbot version of Kalani Hilliker, a 16-year-old television personality, who is renowned for her appearance.
Kalani Bot analyzes and simulates influencer’s conversational style across social media accounts to define its persona. The bot gets smarter as she learns new fan interaction. The bot’s detailed analytics deliver feedback on engagement levels, offering reporting metrics across average conversation length, branded messages, bot mentions, sentiment analysis, and semantic analysis.
Source: CoverGirl
Key Results –
14 x more conversations than an average post
91% positive sentiments
Average of 27 messages per conversation
48% of the conversation leading to a coupon delivery
51% click through on coupon delivery
3. Virtual Product Trial
Looking for your perfect foundation shade or lipstick, beauty chatbots will help you in finding the right color. You just need to click your picture, upload it, and the bot will automatically match and create a selfie with the exact color.
Sephore’s Virtual Artist helps try on lipstick shade instantly. The virtual artist includes AI-powered color matching technology. Sephora has launched an app that gives the users the opportunity to try in 1000’s of shades of contour, bronzer, and highlighter.
Source: Sephora
L’Oréal’s beauty bot has made gift giving easier. They have recently launched a bot named Beauty Gifter asking both the gift giver and recipient questions to sell personalized makeup and skin care gifts.
Beauty Gifter starts by asking the price range of the gift giver and age. Then the bot sends a gift card to the recipient saying, “I want to buy you a gift.”
The bot then asks recipient questions about their skin tone and type, whether dry or oily skin are concerns, and what color combinations they prefer.. Once questions are finished, the bot then sends a series of gift options to the gift giver.
Source: Strategy Online
4. Automating Salon Booking Services
Another big part of the beauty industry is salon services. And chatbot has extended its hands over the salon industry.
These establishments have always been stressed about managing their appointments over Social media and phones.
AI-powered chatbots have the capability to automate a lot of management and support issues from customer service, lead generation, appointment bookings; everything can be customized according to your business.
For bookings, you can integrate the bot to automate your entire business process. The chatbot can start by customized greetings, and then ask for the required services, followed by their contact details, and preferred date and time.
The customers can generate the booking request via the bot, and the provided salon will get notified following an e-mail or message. The bot will automatically schedule an appointment automatically in the calendar, and can even send reminders to the customer.
In addition to this, there is also an option to integrate live chat agents in case the bot gets struck. The system automates as much as possible, and also sets up certain rules when a human agent needs to get notified. This can be done when there is an unhappy customer who wants to speak to a human.
Many big beauty brands are now embracing chatbot technology. This marks the beginning of the trend towards more personalized and intelligent beauty experiences. And the future promises many exciting digital transformations in the beauty industry as the big names enhance their customer experiences with the use of AI/ ML technology.
