Webinar Recap: Create the Ideal Customer Experience, Without Giving Up Control

I had the privilege of hosting a webinar with Peter Curran, President and Co-Founder of Cirrus10, and expert consultant on designing web ecommerce architectures.

You can listen to the entire webinar below, and I’ll mention some of the highlights of what Peter and I discussed.

Companies that have digital commerce businesses need to meet the demands of customers who are asking for more personalized experiences. Forrester reported that 36% of US online adults believe that retailers should offer them more personalized experiences, and Gartner has confirmed that sellers who personalize the customer experience see greater levels of customer engagement and higher retention. A Fast Company piece from June 2018 explains the challenge facing retailers as they think about Amazon:

“The problem is, most can’t possibly win against Amazon by playing the e-commerce giant’s game. To survive (and thrive) in a marketplace where price and convenience rein supreme, retailers of all stripes need to provide something that Amazon can’t: high-quality, human-touch customer service.”

Watch the webinar recording to hear Peter’s real-life examples of shopping for tents, utility pants, and lingerie. He highlights how poorly supported ecommerce browse and search experiences harm click-through, conversion, and revenue. And he compares those examples with sites that improve shopper loyalty by giving customers more relevant, human-touch shopping experiences.

Click here to watch the webinar.

Ecommerce companies should be able to use both business rules and machine learning. Our digital commerce solution hyper-personalizes search and browsing, while letting the merchandiser curate the end-to-end experience, for the “ideal customer experience, without giving up control.”

In the webinar, Peter discusses the challenges that merchandisers face maintaining huge sets of business rules in an ever-changing marketplace. Customer preferences change organically, new products come to market, and the rise of third-party marketplaces can double or triple the size of an e-retailer’s product catalog overnight.

None of these challenges mean that the business rules are going away. Rather, business rules and Artificial Intelligence must interact with each other if teams are going to manage the growing time commitment to maintain merchandising rules. Because Fusion AI can minimize the time they spend maintaining those rules, it frees merchandisers to dedicate more time to the activities where deep human insight and expertise is required.

A handful of companies have spent billions developing AI on their own platforms. (Peter introduced us to an acronym that names those companies: “G-MAFIA,” which stands for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Apple. We mean no disrespect to the G-MAFIA, but thousands of ecommerce companies cannot invest their way into that exclusive AI club.

Lucidworks gives merchandisers a platform to:

• Curate the shopper experience using their ecommerce expertise,
• Personalize results for the shopper, and
• Optimize the entire end-to-end process with applied machine learning.

Watch the webinar replay for hypothetical scenarios showing how Lucidworks Fusion combines human and machine intelligence, delivers relevant search results before the shopper knows to ask, and scales the number of ML models for product recommendations.

If you want to learn more about how to increase conversions on your site, boost order values, and improve customer loyalty, contact us and schedule a meeting with one of our expert consultants.