How Digital Humans Help Brands Tap Into the Untapped Customer

In the past few years, self-service tools have become a cornerstone of online shopping. These tools are great for confident shoppers who know what they're looking for but need a nudge in the right direction. Many great businesses have mastered self-service and the other tools necessary to support digital transactions. Nevertheless, companies still wish to grow — the question is, where will this growth come from?

Tapping Into the Untapped Customer

When businesses attempt to grow their base, they make investment decisions based on data from their existing customers. Unfortunately, this data can only tell brands what they already know and isn’t a sufficient pathway to new growth.

New growth comes from the untapped customer. If one were playing devil’s advocate, one might retort by asking, “If brands have mastered the toolsets necessary to serve their customers, what customers are left?” The answer is the customers who aren’t searching — specifically, those who don’t know what they're looking for.

These untapped customers have the need but lack the knowledge or experience to find the product or service to meet that need. They often encounter feelings of doubt, intimidation or embarrassment and thus refrain from searching. Such customers need a self-service solution that can identify what they're looking for even if they don’t have the right jargon or language to articulate it properly, whatever “it” is.

Case in Point: Dad Visits Sephora

There are four words fathers outnumbered by the women of their households dread to hear on a Saturday afternoon: "Let's go to Sephora." This angst has nothing to do with their wife and daughters or the brand itself, but the fear of being confused for 20- to 30-plus minutes. To many dads, Sephora is an alien place where everything is in a language they recognize but can’t quite understand, like a time traveler listening to Shakespeare’s English.

Sephora has locked down the typical cosmetics shopper who is well-informed, experienced and knows what they're looking for. However, the uninitiated father represents the untapped growth segment worth targeting. These men love their wives and daughters (and sons!) and desire nothing more than buying the right gift for a birthday or Christmas. But they have no idea what that "right gift" is.

Introducing Digital Humans

Sephora (and many other online retailers) wants to grow, and these fathers have the money and desire to transact. Businesses can connect these two well-aligned objectives by introducing digital humans, the pinnacle of conversational intelligence.

Digital humans save customers from second-guessing themselves or abandoning the cart or chatbot conversation because they feel lost, impatient or overwhelmed. They don’t judge, are infinitely patient, and support the customer through personalized recommendations and on-brand product information.

A digital human can know everything there is to know about Sephora's entire product line and current trends in society, empowering the shopper to buy the “right thing” for their daughter's birthday. Put simply, this technology matches the consumer with a product that they wouldn't even know how to start looking for in the first place.

What Can Retail Brands Do?

When implementing digital humans into sales, marketing, and customer service environments, retailers should leverage their existing large language model investments. Likewise, they must be mindful of who these solutions will help — i.e., the dad visiting Sephora. Understanding the untapped audience will enable the custom artificial intelligence-powered digital human to foster emotional connections at the scale needed for global enterprise retail, empowering fathers everywhere to brave the uncharted cosmetic waters for their loved ones.

Tyler Merritt is the chief technology officer of UneeQ, a global leader in generative AI digital human technology.