SEARCH: THE SECRET WEAPON TO A GREAT OMNICHANNEL …

SEARCH: THE SECRET WEAPON TO A GREAT OMNICHANNEL EXPERIENCE

Search: the secret weapon to a great omnichannel experience 2

Why read this eBook?There is no telling what the future holds for retail, but one thing is certain: digital channels are the next battlefield — and the next big opportunity. Consumers are online more than ever, and they are increasingly selective and increasingly impatient. Digital winners will meet their needs in an efficient, intuitive and personalized manner, and, most importantly, whatever platform they are on.

In this eBook, we’ll — take a look at winning omnichannel strategies, and how

they meet consumer demand for fast, personalized, and convenient shopping,

— talk about how search gives you an edge in the increasingly competitive retail landscape,

— see and how to meet the challenges of building great omnichannel search and discovery experiences.


Reebok did just that with their award-winning “Sport the Unexpected” campaign, where they leveraged Amazon Alexa and Google Voice to give away limited edition versions of their Club C Sneakers. Fans could enter the contest to win the crystal-encrusted shoes by saying “open Reebok Sneaker Drop” to their voice assistants. The program would ask them for basic information, including their name and shoe size, then enter them into the sweepstakes.

The contest not only generated buzz about the new Club C sneakers, but also helped the brand collect information about potential customers.

There are several factors that made this digital interaction unique: the scarcity of the limited edition product, the novelty of the high tech approach, the ease of entry. But the backbone of it all is a seamless search technology: one that’s available via voice, and that enables the right find with high speed and accuracy. Busy consumers might not take the time to sit down and visit a website to enter a contest, but a quick conversation with Alexa is comparatively easy, ensuring the success of this campaign.

Winning omnichannel strategiesThe critical differentiator that makes visitors convert and return is user experience. Your competition already knows this: wise retailers are innovating by adding new perks, services, and technologies to attract and retain customers, and not only on their websites, but everywhere and anywhere their customers might be.

One way to capture and keep customers’ interest is to create a novel event that takes advantage of many different platforms people use on a daily basis.

WINNING WITH SEAMLESS VOICE SEARCH


WINNING WITH A PERSONALIZED OMNICHANNEL SERVICE

Imagine a website visitor buying a bottle of shampoo for a specific need — say for her suddenly thinning hair. There are two scenarios she could encounter on your digital properties.

Scenario 1One is a purely transactional experience in which she searches for keywords like “shampoo thin hair”. If your search is not great (for example, doesn’t account for synonyms for “thin hair”, such as “fine hair”), you will very likely loose this customer.

But let’s say you have a good search on your website; however, your customer prefers browsing on her tablet while watching TV, or switches to her mobile device while playing with her kids. If her search history and preferences are forgotten on those devices, she will be frustrated, and far more likely to hop over to Amazon, find the right shampoo a dollar cheaper, and buy it there. Once again, a customer lost.

Scenario 2 In a different scenario, you’ve equipped your site search with personalization. Not only will your site display relevant and personalized search results based on your customer’s past purchase history and preferences, but also new products, relevant categories and articles, and complementary offers.

When your customer later reconnects on her tablet, she will see the same personalized results and offers. When she runs out of the shampoo, she will be just as easily able to buy it on her mobile, and add on the conditioner you have suggested as a part of your brand campaign.

Providing a personalized omnichannel experience will win the customer’s business and their loyalty for future purchases.


These examples illustrate how users demand intuitive experiences that deliver precisely what they are looking for, fast and easy. At the heart of these now moments is modern search. Finding the right product, information, or media content, is what determines whether a customer engages, subscribes, or buys from a business.

Customer journeys start with search, whether it is on their phone, tablet, or laptop. With over 3.8 billion global internet users searching for anything and everything online, businesses must meet multiple demands:

• Speed — results and experiences must be returned at lightning fast speed

• Omnipresence — meeting consumer intent not only in an instantaneous manner, but anywhere the consumers find themselves

• Personalized, relevant results at every stage of the customer journey

Search: the secret weapon to great omnichannel


Say you are a first time buyer of tickets to a football game. You go to the team’s website, and while you are at it, decide to buy some merchandise to wear to the game. Alas, merchandise is on a separate site that is 1) hard to find and 2) looks completely different than the ticket sales site. You visit the mobile app and are in for yet another experience, completely disconnected from the other two. As a consumer, you leave not only disappointed, but likely frustrated — and the business misses an easy upsell opportunity.

But if the value of omnichannel is clear, why is it still difficult to find great omnichannel experiences out there? Because building great omnichannel experiences is hard.

But building great omnichannel search is hard


networks and connectivity issues. There are also complex UX decisions to address, such as the size and type of the search bar, how many results you show, whether to display lists, images or something in between.

Capturing and responding to customer intent on mobile is both art and science.

While using voice is an opportunity to solve some of the challenges, providing great conversational search experience is complex. Successful voice search is fundamentally more challenging compared to traditional text search:

— Voice queries are more complex than keyword-based searches. Users will use different and richer vocabulary through natural language.

— With voice-only interfaces, you only have one result to return to the user, which requires significantly higher degrees of relevance.

— Results must be delivered at what appears to the consumer as speed of thought, mimicking the pace and style at which natural language conversations occur.

Modern search and discovery technologies must meet these challenges to make sure that every flavor of the end-user experience is not only functional but enjoyable.

OMNICHANNEL CHALLENGES: THE TECH We know that the key to building a modern omnichannel strategy is replicating the same relevant, personalized experience across diverse platforms: desktop, apps, mobile sites, and smart speakers/virtual assistants. But there are many technical challenges to creating such high quality presence on each new platform.

Take mobile. When it comes to search, conveying your desktop on a mobile device is more than just a 1:1 reproduction. The physical and technical challenges mobile introduces can complicate a shopper’s experience, leading to shopping cart abandonment and lower conversion rates. It is critical to address physical constraints: dramatically reduced digital real estate due to screen size, typing challenges for the user on the move, slow


OMNICHANNEL CHALLENGES: THE PEOPLE

The end users want to quickly find what they’re looking for, but also be delighted by the experience. They want the same quality consumer-grade experience that they are used to with Amazon and Google, regardless of the platform they are using. But most companies don’t have hundreds of developers and UX designers at hand.

Behind every great user search experience are busy teams: developers who build or implement, then maintain the search technology, and business teams (product managers, merchandisers, e-commerce marketers and omnichannel strategists) who own search data and want insight into it. Omnichannel introduces a new layer of complexity to an already difficult problem: building great search while balancing the needs of users, businesses, and developers.

The business stakeholders want to understand and adjust the user experience without having to understand the tech behind it or needing to rely on IT/developers to make changes. Yet search platforms that allow them to be agile provide mediocre user experiences and subpar relevance.

The developers want solutions that are easy to implement and maintain across platforms and devices, while still retaining control to fine-tune, evolve and innovate. But most search solutions only allow one or the other.


How search meets the omnichannel challenge Centralize and unify your dataFor this to be the case, both business stakeholders and developers need a centralized, accessible, unified source of data about that user, and the ability to collect signals sent by users:• Which search results do they click on, when and from which device?• Which content do they go through or add to their wish list?• What product do they add to cart?

Use search analyticsNext, they need search analytics to allow business teams to collect such data, and, perhaps even more importantly, connect it to data lakes via industry-standard tools like Segment and Google Tag Manager.

Invest in advanced featuresLast but not the least, features like A/B testing, personalization, merchandising and recommendations should be available in a user-friendly dashboard with drag-and-drop tools that provide insight into user behavior, and opportunities to optimize user experiences.

So how do you create an omnichannel experience that meets the needs of all vested parties?

Let’s take our football experience as an example. What would make for a great user experience, while making developers’ jobs easier, and giving business users agility and control?

First, consistency For ticketing and merchandise sites that look and behave differently, as well as for mobile or any other platform, developers can add search using a set of prebuilt UI components. This makes the user experience consistent, while relieving developers from the need to implement different software solutions for each platform or channel.

Second, fluidity and ease of use Imagine if, on the ticketing section of the website, users could see a content carousel with T-shirts, hats and scarves that they can add to their basket at the same time as the ticket.


Omnichannel successes

How search supports the omnichannel strategy of WW, with personalization and voice

WW (formerly Weight Watchers), a perennially popular wellness and weight-management program, requires users to input their food intake throughout the day using a proprietary points system. To do so, they search for different foods and recipes to learn their point values, a process that was difficult on the program’s old website.

During a major website overhaul, WW upgraded their search capabilities using Algolia. Not only did it make their search 100x faster, but it also allowed for personalized search results factoring in member-generated custom content and past user behavior.

They didn’t stop there. In October 2018, WW launched “Wellow,” a voice app on Google Home and Alexa. Now, users can track their food points without lifting a finger.

WW is disrupting the wellness industry by introducing modern technologies and building a digital approach that makes wellness accessible for everyone.

Decathlon’s omnichannel strategy has resulted in a 50% higher conversion rate.

Decathlon provides high-quality, sustainable and cost-effective gear and equipment for 70 sports to customers of all ages worldwide. What makes Decathlon Singapore unique is their cutting-edge omnichannel strategy. Decathlon enables their customers to collect any item in less than 2 hours in one of numerous click-and-collect stores in Singapore — whether they order it from their phone, laptop, or the store itself. Furthermore, the store has to be fewer than 15 minutes from the customer’s location.

Decathlon achieved this with Algolia’s personalized, omnichannel search on web, mobile and in stores. Decathlon offers in-store computers to shoppers, so they can navigate the entire catalog — more than 25,000 products — while benefiting from Decathlon’s teammates’ expertise.

Decathlon applies the ranking logic via their search dashboard, using business criteria such as number of purchases and attributes specific to Decathlon such as the sport discipline.


THANK YOUFOR READING

ABOUT ALGOLIAAlgolia enables e-commerce businesses to create fast, relevant and intuitive search and discovery experiences that increase conversions, engagement and customer loyalty. We deliver personalized shopper experiences and fuel your digital strategy with sophisticated search technologies like conversational search. More than 8,600 companies like Under Armour, Lacoste, Birchbox, Dior, L’Occitane En Provence and Bringmeister rely on Algolia.

To learn more, visit resources.algolia.com

SEARCH: THE SECRET WEAPON TO A GREAT OMNICHANNEL …

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