How Beauty Personalisation Balances Consumer Desires vs Consumer Fears

Artificial Intelligence can seem like a step into the unknown for many customers, a brave new world they are not ready for and have yet to experience.

Of course, this isn’t true. This year, Pega carried out a global study of 6,000 consumers where only 33% of respondents reported coming into contact with AI. If however, one considers that 77% of them actually used an AI-powered service or device, such as virtual home assistants, intelligent chat bots and predictive product suggestions, then here is a huge gulf of understanding between the imagined idea of AI and the realities. Beauty personalisation and beauty recommendation technology is one beauty trend to stay.

After all, back in 2011, Gartner predicted that by 2020, 85 percent of customer relationships will be managed without human interaction. It now looks as though this estimate could easily be surpassed and beauty personalisation technology is at the apex of that technological personalisation beauty trend.

These AI tools are designed with the customer in mind. Customers have been shown to have more faith in human employees than some technological alternatives, and will engage more readily with a chatbot if they don’t know its a bot. However, human employees cannot be on hand at the drop of a hat, at all times of the night and day, leaving the consumer at the mercy of regular working hours and potentially long queues and waiting times just to speak with a customer service agent.

AI allows for convenient self-service, which for the beauty industry makes it akin to shopping online over going to a busy shopping centre. Beauty AI is particularly apt as concerns beauty personalisation technology.

Another fear that consumers have is over their private data and information. Giving the consumer the sense that they control the information given can be important, as they fill out details about themselves and can elect what details to give, whether that’s about their hair or skin or anything else. Beauty personalisation offers this sense of control.

It’s all very well to offer a customer a Swiss pocket knife of beauty recommendations, but a customer wants to be able to navigate a beauty and cosmetics brand website with ease. This stands alongside continued machine learning about browsing habits and forms the base for allowing for tailored beauty recommendations, a base that comes from the customer themselves. This is key to beauty personalisation technology.

In terms of addressing both desires and fears, it’s upfront about the information used and gathered to create a superior shopping experience, the continued gathering of information allowing that experience to be ever more exact while being immediate where human analysis of beauty trends can not be. There is a need to be upfront with the consumer as to what their information will be used for and show them the advantage of it clearly, since gathering all this data using AI can help make an immediate impact on an improved personalised shopping experience, which just in the hands of a sales assistant would not be possible.