ABFRL partners Algonomy for personalized shopping experience

NEW DELHI: Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd. on Wednesday said it has entered into a strategic partnership with Bengaluru-based Algonomy, which offers artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to retailers, to deploy its hyper-personalisation solutions to ABFRL’s brands.

Pantaloons is the first ABFRL brand to deploy Algonomy's personalisation tools. This will be followed by other brands, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

ABFRL will use Algonomy’s flagship products to leverage real-time shopper behavior, as well as store data to personalize end-to-end omni channel experience for shoppers across all consumer channels including website, app, email and in-store, apart from search, browse, product recommendations and content.

The move comes as shoppers in general expect brands to offer a seamless shopping experience across channels. For retailers, this means upping their ante on digital shopping channels.

“Customers today expect the very best and completely seamless shopping experience from store to digital, and our partnership with Algonomy, will enable us in delivering on these expectations by personalizing across the digital channels, without any experience fragmentation,” said Praveen Shrikhande, chief digital and information officer, ABFRL.

Pantaloons for instance has launched a Style Finder that lets shoppers specify their categories and occasion and allows them to shop for personalised products.

"For us, it’s important to understand each customer, their intent and context in real time and personalize their experience at a 1:1 level. Manual merchandising and segmentation cannot handle the scale, and as a result e-commerce suffers from low conversions,” said Varun Rajwade, AVP, product and digital CX, ABFRL.

Algonomy will work with ABFRL on its digital transformation journey, offering integrated online experiences across recommendation, search, and content for the fashion retailer, said Amit Agarwal, senior vice president, sales and business development, Algonomy.

ABFRL operates clothing brands such as Louis Philippe, Van Heusen, Allen Solly and Peter England in India. It has a network of 3,212 stores across approximately 31,000 multi-brand outlets with over 6,800 points of sales in department stores across India. It also operates the Pantaloons retail chain. 

The company holds exclusive online and offline rights to the India network of fast fashion brand Forever 21, apart from several such associations with international brands.