You know what your shoppers buy, but you have no idea how they shop

There’s a question Keith Zubchevich likes to ask retail executives: “What does it mean to your brand to build a good digital experience?”

 

The answers, he says, tend to cluster around the same general ideas: speed, personalisation, seamless checkout. Surfacing the right product at the right moment. He doesn’t disagree with any of it. But he thinks the industry has been solving for the wrong variables.

 

“It means letting your customers shop how they actually want to,” says Zubchevich, President and CEO of Conviva, the behavioural analytics platform that processes 500 billion digital events per day. “Not forcing them into the neat little journeys you laid out for them.”

 

That distinction – subtle on the surface, but difficult to execute – is growing as AI intercepts more of the online shopping experience. Retailers are deploying AI agents into their apps, websites and customer service flows at a pace that would have seemed improbable three years ago. And most of them, Zubchevich argues, are basing them on the “neat little journeys” they expect their shoppers to follow.

 

The DNA of a shopper

 

The idea behind Conviva is both simple and, in practice, radical: every shopper has behavioural DNA. The way a person buys from a given retailer is unique – not just compared to other shoppers, but compared to how that same person shops anywhere else.

 

“Take a shopper who buys the same toothpaste from the same e-commerce brand every month,” Zubchevich says. “They know what they want. They get in, they get out. Any friction at all and the brand risks losing them to a competitor.” Put that same person on a furniture site, making a decision that costs thousands of dollars, and the behaviour flips entirely. They browse, they leave, they come back. They save items, abandon carts, compare options across a dozen sessions over several weeks. They’re the same human being – but they’re an entirely different shopper.

 

The tools that retailers have used to understand their customers for the past two decades cannot tell the difference. Session-based analytics – the dominant model for virtually every web measurement platform – treats each visit as a discrete, isolated event. The shopper who researches a sofa across six sessions looks, in that model, like six separate visitors who never converted. The sale, when it finally arrives, gets credited to the last session. Everything before it – the research, the hesitation, the saved items in their cart – vanishes.

 

Conviva’s research found that 67 per cent of online shoppers don’t follow linear journeys. The multi-session, high-consideration shopper in the sofa example isn’t an exception. For many retailers, they represent one of their largest behavioural segments. And the entire industry has been measuring them as if they were anomalies.

 

Should AI agents act with emotion?

 

The reason all of this matters now, more than it did even two years ago, is AI.

 

“AI agents are the future of digital experiences,” Zubchevich says. There is no question whether retailers will deploy them – the largest brands already have them live on their sites and apps. The question is whether those agents will have the intelligence to create good consumer experiences.

 

Because digital experience, he argues, is fundamentally emotional. “For the shopper who likes to take their time, ask a lot of questions, think before they buy – the agent needs patience. For the shopper who wants to get in and out without friction – it needs immediacy. An agent that treats both of these shoppers the same way will fail both.”

 

Conviva makes it possible

 

Conviva is built around that premise. It gives context to AI agents at the moment of decision so they know exactly how to interact with an individual, based on how they typically act on a brand’s site, what they’ve just done and what their intent is.

 

It’s a bet on something Zubchevich believes the industry is only beginning to reckon with: that you cannot build agents smart enough to meet your customers where they are if you’ve never understood where they actually are to begin with.

---

For more information, visit conviva.ai