Need to Solve for Zero Results? Introducing Never Null

Presented at Activate Product Discovery 2021. Introducing Never Null, a new cloud-based service from Lucidworks. Join us for a quick update and learn how the solution can help you slash zero results and expand your product assortment for a better commerce experience.

Speaker: Jenny Gomez, Lucidworks Director of Product Marketing

Transcript:

Jenny Gomez: Hi there. Thanks so much for joining my session today here at Activate Product Discovery. I am so excited you could join, and I hope you’re really enjoying all of the amazing content that’s been going on today. My name is Jenny Gomez. I’m the product marketing director here at Lucidworks, and I wanted to talk to you really quickly about a new product we just launched, called Never Null.

It’s a product specifically focused towards the commerce ecosystem, and our product discovery customers. That’s you. It is a cloud-based solution that’s supposed to help you slash your zero-results. We decided to productize Never Null because we were working with one of our very valuable big-box retailer customers over the Cyber 5 Weekend, and we helped them decrease their zero-results by 90% during one of the most pivotal times of the year for them.

That brought in millions of dollars of new revenue for them, and we thought, “Wait a second, we might be onto something here.” So, we wanted to offer Never Null to all of our customers and all of our prospects. Anybody that might be interested in slashing zero-results and expanding their product assortment, is a perfect fit for Never Null.

So, what exactly is Never Null? You get it right, you wanna slash zero-results. But what does that actually mean Never Null is a cloud-based solution, which means that if you’re a Fusion customer or not, you can deploy Never Null today. If you’re using a different search platform and not Fusion, you can deploy Never Null today. It’s a really powerful tool that uses semantic vector search machine learning methodologies, and you’ll see this little scatterplot here on this slide.

It’s very different from, let’s say, a knowledge graph methodology, or even just a straight semantic methodology. But it essentially takes your customer signals and your product catalog, runs it through a proprietary algorithm here internally, and spits out a product catalog that you can ingest right into your site to slash those zero-results and essentially create a real, much more dynamic customer experience for your shoppers.

Now, zero-results is something that happens all the time. If you’re a multi-assortment commerce customer, let’s say you’re a grocery store, or a beauty brand that sells lots of different brands within your shopping experience, this product will help you combat those zero-results by… For instance, we’ll use the beauty example. Let’s say you have a shopper that’s coming into your experience looking for a very specific brand of green eyeshadow and you don’t actually happen to carry that brand. The customer is gonna come in and search your experience for said brand, this color eyeshadow, this green eyeshadow. Normally what would happen is you would surface a zero-results page to that customer because you just don’t carry that eyeshadow.

But now, what you can do is take the semantic vector search methodology and map it to similar products that you have in your product catalog. So, a customer might get a green eyeshadow that’s not the exact green from the exact brand that they’re looking for, but they’ll get a green that will definitely make them happy. And because we’re ingesting some of your customer signals, that eyeshadow is going to be personalized to other searches they might’ve deployed in your experience. So, you can match an eyeshadow to something they might have actually shopped for in the past, and you can also expand your product assortment here. So, it’s not just about surfacing an eyeshadow that’s similar, it’s also about surfacing say maybe a blush that goes really well with that green eyeshadow, or another eyeshadow that’s the same brand as the eyeshadow that you’re surfacing, or maybe a new eyeshadow brush, so that they can use that brush when they buy that eyeshadow.

And what’s gonna happen here is that instead of getting that zero-result, they’re gonna see a different array of products, and it’s gonna increase your average order value, and your click-to-cart conversions. You’re gonna offer them an experience that they might not have gotten on another site that doesn’t have Never Null deployed within their search. Another great example that I’m surfacing here is a vacuum cleaner example.

Let’s say you’re a big-box store that sells all different kinds of vacuum cleaners. Let’s say a customer’s coming in looking for a very very specific vacuum cleaner that you just don’t carry, or maybe you’re out of stock. So, you can surface similar vacuum cleaners, vacuum cleaners that might actually be more powerful, might be the same price point, might have the same sort of product details as what they’re searching for, as well as some accessories that’ll go with that vacuum cleaner to increase that average order value. It is a wildly powerful tool. So, it’s not just about solving for zero-results, it’s about ensuring that more of your product catalog is being surfaced to that customer in a really targeted, really personalized, really seamless fashion. And it’s gonna create that experience that’s gonna not only delight your shoppers, but make them come back for more over and over and over again. So, you’re really increasing that retention and loyalty as well.

On the other side of the house, because it detects and rewrites broken queries, manual rule creation, you’re actually saving a little bit of cash and frustration and effort on the side of your in-house merchandisers. Now they have less effort in building manual rules and having to manually fix broken queries because this tool will do it for them. That means they’ll have more time to focus on larger strategic initiatives. So, you’re also creating a better employee experience by creating a customer experience that’s delightful for everyone involved.

We’re super excited about this product here at Lucidworks.We’re excited about the opportunities that it provides to your shoppers, the opportunities that it provides to you in-house for your merchandisers. And it’s a really simple, cloud-based solution that you can deploy quickly and easily. We just need your product catalog, some of your signals, and then we’ll run it through Fusion for you. So, you don’t even have to have Fusion, you could be using one of our competitor’s search tools. We don’t care! We’ll still make sure you’re using the power that Lucidworks can deploy to fix your zero-results and expand that product assortment. It’s pretty exciting.

Thanks so much, guys. I’m keeping this short and sweet today. If you do wanna do a technical deep dive into what semantic search really means, my colleague Eric Redman is doing an amazing session at the end of the day that I really implore you join. He’s just really diving deep into the machine learning methodologies behind what makes Never Null so powerful.

And if you wanna chat with me after the session, please feel free to join the Zoom room, and we can chat in real time and I can help you answer any questions or direct you to the person that can probably answer it a little bit more expertly than me.

Thanks so much again for joining and I hope to see you in the chat room soon.