Reading Time: 3 minutes Back in 2016 when Vue.ai was launched, not many retailers had heard of AI-based personalization engine. Even retailers like Starbucks had just begun conversations about the possibility of AI Being innovators in this space, this meant that we had to work as extensions of retail companies, helping them tap into the power of AI to demonstrate significant business impact. Today we are 200+ people across 4 continents and we still work this way!
Vue.ai’s Personalization solution is a distillation of everything we’ve learned over the last 4 years of working with over a 100 retailers across the globe, helping them build personalized customer experiences that move the needle.
Here are some of our biggest lessons:
- Too many conversations about personalization are really about segmentation. At the end of the day, a shopper wants to see content that is relevant to them and that they love. Segmentation as a strategy is just not enough. Clustering people based on some shared behavior or characteristic is convenient but often has no impact.
- Data is a problem, everywhere. Retailers found themselves at the right end of a powerplay between them and the CPG industry as a result of data. Yet most organizations we worked with, irrespective of their size, had broken data and data in silos.
- A solution to one retailer’s problem is not a solution to another’s. Just as we kept telling our customers that their shoppers are all different and they need to understand their individual preferences and intent, retailers too came in various shades. A single, one-size-fits-all solution simply won’t cut it. The inventory a retailer carries, whether they have an in-house label, their brand strategy- all have a big impact on how a personalization engine should be designed.
- eCommerce teams are increasingly expected to function at superhuman levels and be experts in marketing, merchandising and technology. They end up using a dozen tools to manage customer experiences and these tools don’t ‘talk’ to each other. This adds to their work load and leads to more broken data.
Vue.ai’s Personalization solution addresses many of these challenges. At its core, its mission is to help eCommerce teams move beyond transactions and build customer experiences that are so remarkable, they define the brand. But while it keeps it simple for eCommerce teams, behind doors it does a lot of heavy lifting.
- The AI makes data better. It enriches metadata and generates rich customer profiles. It maps individual shopper’s preferences across a wide range of attributes. It uses behavioral data to understand intent.
- Every shopper gets relevant content. Vue.ai’s Personalization solution alters content real-time to ensure every shopper finds the products they love, irrespective of what segment or journey they are on.
- Simple, easy-to-use, end-to-end. Because really, eCommerce teams could do with a lot less complexity in their lives. A single tool from which teams can build, A/B test & optimize everything required to create winning journeys. The metrics dashboard measures direct business impact and keeps track of all relevant KPIs.
- High level of customization. We make it easy and intuitive for eCommerce teams to adjust weightage on algorithms to match their business goals and model. If their inventory has more solid colors than patterns, they can choose to reduce the weightage on patterns. If they have an in-house label that they want to promote, they can add a business filter and turn up the weightage on brands. One product, hundreds of possibilities!
- Stay true to our roots. We continue providing our customers with the support they need to see business benefit from AI Right from helping them bring their strategies to life, to designing and running experiments that push the boundaries of growth and innovation, our dedicated Customer Success teams are committed to helping our customers win.
There is a whole lot more Vue.ai’s Personalization solution offers and I would encourage you to check out our website and demos.
We believe personalization will change the game for eCommerce. At the end of the day personalization is about making a connection with every customer that enters your online store. We understand that this is the only way to retain customers. And customer retention is the only path to sustained growth.
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