Practical routes to a better customer experience
Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are the most exciting developments in marketing and merchandising for decades. They offer many ways to personalize at scale and draw actionable insights from huge pools of customer data. In this series of Episerver guides, we show how marketers and merchandisers can use these algorithms to improve performance across the entire customer journey. Learn how to better attract, engage, convert and care for customers using AI. In this guide: Using AI to successfully combine content and commerce at scale Discover and curate user-generated content with AI Powering site search with AI to improve results and journeys AI that delivers in-store recommendations. The Episerver AI guides: AI and the Customer Experience Revolution - Attract - Engage - Convert - Care
Page 1 Engage: Personalize experiences and journeys Engagement is the core of digital experiences. Companies spend a lot of time, money and resources to improve engagement in their digital channels, often with mixed results. Now with artificial intelligence, you can easily increase engagement through personalizing each and every experience. The challenge: knowing what customers want For many enterprises, increasing engagement has had a steep learning curve. In order to understand user experiences, they have to cycle through a number of processes including customer research and insights, personas, segmentation, wireframes, prototypes, user testing, MVPs and A/B testing. With so many factors and assumptions involved, it can be hard to get it right. The opportunity: individual experiences in real time With the advent of AI-driven personalization, marketers and merchandisers can quickly take engagement to the next level. Rather than only segmenting visitors into general groups, artificial intelligence enables you to customize each individual experience in real time. AI can anticipate what your customers want, while still keeping you in control of your campaigns, rules and strategies. To improve engagement, many companies already personalize customer experiences at the segment level. One of the most common segments is new or existing customers. Companies also segment according to the devices people are using. For example, a retailer might choose to show in-store products to someone on a mobile device, instead of showing other product information. This kind of segmentation is helpful, but it will only take you so far.
Page 2 Combining content and commerce with AI Content in its broadest form everything from images to customer reviews can be an effective way to engage, inform, persuade and reassure customers. Yet finding the right way to combine content and commerce can be tricky and time consuming. If you get it wrong, customers can even be turned away since this shows you don t really know what they want. The opportunity: AI that selects exactly the right content When it comes to content, context means everything. AI and machining learning can help you successfully place the right content, in the right place at the right time, with little or no effort. Getting the context right could be as simple as matching content to a visitor s geographic location. For example, to increase relevance AI can automatically select different language versions or images for appropriate seasons. What makes AI different than segmentation in this case is that it can personalize every experience at scale. AI that knows where the customer is in their journey Another example of context is a customer who puts a product into their cart, then revisits the product page. A static product-content association may trigger the insertion of a trend piece but this could be content the customer has already seen. Artificial intelligence is better able to determine why the customer is back on the product page and can adapt the content appropriately. The customer may be looking for product specifications, pricing information or matching products. You can also look at content and commerce the other way around, in which a piece of content has dynamically inserted products. This kind of seamless integration is both engaging and persuasive. The Episerver solution Content can be an incredibly powerful tool in engaging and converting customers. That s why Episerver has a leading content management system at the heart of its commerce engine. With the addition of Episerver Personalization, customers get a suite of intelligent omnichannel solutions for commerce, content and search personalization. Episerver s solutions include features that help you automatically combine content and commerce in the most effective way possible. For example, Episerver s CMS architecture can automatically localize content for different regions. You can also easily apply content or merchandising rules for different types of visitors and products. When it comes to AI, Episerver s machine-learning algorithms can select the content that performs best in any given context or for individual users. For content selection, Episerver Personalization takes into account factors such as customer data, pages viewed, shopping cart contents and previous orders.
Page 3 Curating user-generated content with AI The value of user-generated content (UGC) in driving trust, engagement and lifetime value is well understood by most retailers. Reviews or testimonials, Twitter feeds, community content and contest entries can all be helpful additions to your digital channels. The challenge: finding and displaying UGC Social media images attract the most attention and are often the most useful to brands. According to Adweek, 85 percent of users surveyed find visual UGC more influential than brand photos or videos. However, repurposing these images outside of the social channels themselves has been difficult from both a technical and privacy perspective. The Episerver solution: AI that curates content Episerver has solved this with a product that does a lot of the work for you. Episerver UGC, powered by Stackla, enables you to easily display user-generated content on your website, commerce site and other channels. It aggregates and curates relevant content that you can personalize for your visitors. Merchandisers can increase average order values and conversions by leveraging social proof on product pages and at the point-of-sale. You can also use Episerver UGC to enrich emails with user-generated content that is personalized for each individual subscriber. Privacy concerns are also handled by a built-in UGC rights management tool and content workflow that help you stay compliant.
Page 4 Powering site search with AI to improve results According to Forrester, an average of 43 percent of users navigate straight to the search box, and searchers are two to three times more likely to convert than non-searchers. In this section, we look at how artificial intelligence can be used to optimize site search and customer journeys. The opportunity: AI that provides better search results AI for site search works because visitors have often given enough signals for an algorithm to predict what they might be looking for. Factors like previous orders, browsing history, location and cart contents help algorithms to improve search results. If the visitor has no profile information, machine learning can use previous searches by others to offer autocomplete suggestions. In addition, machine learning is crucial to turn potential dead-end searches into product views. Fuzzy logic paired with multiple dictionaries will resolve misspellings and synonyms, so that a search for blu flip flop in Australia will successfully return a pair of aqua thongs. Presenting related queries, such as People also searched for, can be particularly effective. Related queries can inspire users with products that reflect their own tastes, while at the same time reassuring them that others share their preferences. Onward omnichannel journeys can be encouraged through search, too, such as by presenting local store availability (through geo-detection). For known customers, this can be even more powerful if they have historically bought online and picked up in-store. The Episerver solution Episerver Personalized Find is an enterprise site search solution that uses artificial intelligence to help customers find exactly what they are looking for. It personalizes the products in search results based on a customer s purchase history, web browsing and email behavior. The result is higher search rankings, more relevant experiences and increased revenue. The solution also includes faceted navigation that gives users control over the attributes they are looking for, such as color, price and size. Machine-learning algorithms can determine an initial selection of products, which can then be filtered by business rules configured manually by merchandisers.
Page 5 AI that increases engagement Episerver clients that use AI-powered personalization show a strong increase in engagement: a 308% boost in pageviews and a 37% increase in average time on site. 308% 37%
Page 6 Delivering in-store recommendations with AI Capturing data from offline transactions is one of the toughest hurdles for many retailers that have physical stores and digital commerce. Yet consider how much intelligence is being lost without this 360-degree view. By taking all transactions into account whatever the channel retailers can turbocharge their personalization strategy. Loyalty schemes have long been the primary way to link the two realms, and new lower cost, tablet-driven options have opened up this possibility to smaller retailers. Capturing a shopper s identity using digital receipts, POS and in-store WiFi is increasingly common, too. Beacons have yet to see widespread adoption, but offer similar potential. The opportunity: Connecting in-store and online experiences What could in-store personalization look like? One Episerver client in high-end fashion has connected an interactive mirror to AI data from its website. By using RFID chips in clothing labels, the mirror doubles as a screen. The customer then sees in the mirror a custom selection of products and accessories that are filtered according to merchandiser rules and stock availability. In this way, category and product associations from the online channel are used to increase order values in the real world.
About Episerver Episerver empowers digital leaders to easily create engaging experiences for customers with measurable business results. The Episerver Digital Experience Cloud unifies digital content, commerce and marketing in one platform, including omnichannel solutions for intelligent personalization and campaigns. Founded in 1994, Episerver has offices in the US, UK, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, Singapore, Vietnam and the UAE. Episerver Personalization is a suite of personalization solutions powered by artificial intelligence. The solutions analyze visitor and customer data to present individualized product selections, content and search results in any channel, including email recommendations triggered by real-time behavior. Easily create relevant experiences that increase engagement, conversions and sales. For more information, visit episerver.com.