5 Ways to Out-Amazon Amazon in Online Selling

2. The digital Home Depot associate. Home Depot's store associates are considered experts, and in the company's own words, critical to its competitive advantage. Retailers can deploy digital self-service versions of these associates on their websites or make that expertise available to their contact-center sales agents. For example, case-based reasoning (CBR), an artificial intelligence technology that simulates human intelligence, can be employed to drive self-service conversations with consumers to help them find and buy what they need through a step-by-step dialog in the same way they would converse with the best Home Depot associate before making a purchase. This is a great way to help shoppers get past SKU clutter on your website. The self-service system can multitask with hundreds of consumers at the same time — an associate on legal steroids! With the same technology, contact-center agents can become as good as the best in-store associates.