Search & Personalization: AI Like Never Before10 min read

Search & Personalization: AI Like Never Before10 min read

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Our Founder’s note on the launch of Vue 2.0

Over the better part of the last decade, my team and I have worked with over a thousand enterprise-scale eCommerce companies who have shared insights on a lot of their digital goals with us. While everyone has had their own ways of articulating these to us, the patterns across your takeaways have shown us how flawed most AI solutions in the market have been in these past 6-7 years.

We have a motto here at our company

Every AI solution is only as good as the measurable impacts it has on the eCommerce business it works with

And the feedback we’ve received on our customer’s experiences with AI solutions in the market have been very much in line with this motto of ours. 

eCommerce companies want two things at the end of the day – to improve ways to grow their top line and find the right types of solutions to save costs and get more productive. In the coming months, we’ll be publishing all the data we’ve collected on everything we’ve heard over these 7 years.

Most eCommerce businesses either didn’t know where to start or had not seen any ROI for what they had tried so far. So many of our early-stage sales conversations revolve around talking about how and where AI should be deployed to best give results rather than selling any of our products at all. 

We brought a structured, logic-led, and bottom-up approach to AI and it’s been a rewarding journey since. A culmination of all that we learned is what has resulted in this first version of what we are launching as the Vue version 2.0  today. With Vue 2.0 we’re helping businesses fix their data first. Fixing the foundation of every digital business that works with us today is our first goal with this launch. From there, we’re helping them create high-quality experiences with that data, allowing this data to actively move and interact with data from all the digital channels, following the user across their journeys without any interruption over time. 

For the first time in the industry – we’re unifying data enrichment, clean up and the customer experience suite into one interface allowing product and technical teams to work together and to have a single view into the entire end-to-end process.

With a content manager, digital experience management manager, audience manager, and a extensive set of connectors, we’re enabling teams to go step by step from clean data to power-packed performance.

The impact? – A unified view into the entire content and catalog data your business has improved search results, better SEO performance, meaningful recommendations, an increase in engagement, conversion, frequency, and a customer experience that shows each and every one of your millions of customers that you understand who they are, why they’re with you and what they’re interested in, in the highest resolution you’ve ever been able to till now. We’re very  excited to be able to build this roadmap and create a new decade of impact-driven AI for our customers. 

– Ashwini Asokan, Founder & CEO, Vue.ai – Mad Street Den

Poor Data = A Shaky Foundation For Search & Personalization

There are always newer and better ways of improving personalized experiences for customers. There is never a dearth of complex new technologies, creative strategies, or fresh ideas for personalizing and optimizing experiences online. But the one reason that many of these don’t give the returns expected of them is poor data. 

Most organizations estimate that they lose about $14.2 million dollars annually because of poor data – Source

And the reasoning seems straightforward enough – the business’ data forms the base of any strategy they deploy on top of it. eCommerce search and personalization can work well only if the business is thoroughly aware of its content, product, service, and customer data to be able to map them to each other. 

However, data is also often a very overwhelming problem for organizations to fix. Most enterprise companies deal with massive amounts of data and ensuring all of it is accurate, rich, and standardized will take up a lot of manpower and time. Hence, the approach often ends up trying to solve other parts of business strategy and personalization in the hope that they will make up for the ugly data.

Vue.ai Fixes Data For Better eCommerce Search & Personalization

For years, at Vue.ai, we worked with enterprise businesses across the globe to help improve online experiences. As we realized that the biggest gap is poor data, we built robust systems that can enrich, standardize, and fix any type of data across industries. For the most part, we would process and fix eCommerce product and customer data through our system and work with them on building customer experiences on top of that. Over the better part of the last decade, we also exposed the system in different parts for business users to work on their data or build experiences optimized for their website.

Now, for the first time ever, we are releasing all parts of our AI system unified into a single interface. With Vue, enterprises can fix their data, build 1:1 user profiles, create digital experiences that shine, and get insights like never before. It is AI like never before. 

This easily scaled, no-code product ensures that poor experiences because of poor data will be a thing of the past. Any business user, even with no technical knowledge, can use the product to clean up their data and build immaculate experiences on top of that.

Vue.ai 2.0 for eCommerce and Retail Teams

Vue.ai 2.0 primarily allows users to do three things:

1. Fix business data – through the Content Manager
2. Build immersive personalized experiences – through the Audience Manager and Digital Experience Management (DXM) Manager
3. Connect and manage data across sources with Connectors

Content Manager

The Content Manager allows you to upload, configure, manage, and enrich catalogs & other data sources that you want to personalize for your users. It is divided into two parts – Explore & Enrich.

Through Explore, you can:

• Create a catalog with any data source and regularly sync catalogs.
• Extract and enrich data from images, videos, and text using NLP, image and video recognition, OCR, and text extraction.
• Organize this enriched data into a structured format.

Through Enrich, users can:

• Building custom taxonomies and attribute structures based on business priorities.
• Structure and label product data efficiently
• Visualize the catalog spread
• Create AI models that can label, categorize and organize data at scale. 

Both the output structured product data and the trained models can be exported to fit into any existing system.

Audience Manager

The Audience Manager allows you to curate different visitor data into audience segments and user profiles based on their behavior on the site. Each of these pre-defined audience segments can have different journeys and tailored experiences. You can

• Effortlessly create a custom segment for your audience /customers based on your business objectives or choose from the list of pre-set audience segments using Audience Builder
• A/B test with multiple audiences for different user experiences.
• Monitor and track detailed audience performance and KPI metrics for each segment
• Check overlap of audience presets as well as the percentage of overlap between audience segments.
• Import/export audience lists

Digital Experience Manager

The Digital Experience Manager maps every individual’s preferences, affinities and intent with the right product data allowing you to create personalized user experiences for every user on the site. You can

• Strategy: Customize personalized recommendations, aligning parameters with business goals for optimized conversions in retail and beyond.
• Template: Tailor product recommendations visually with templates on an eCommerce site, maintaining a consistent yet personalized look and feel across pages.
• Module: Integrate strategies or static content seamlessly with templates in Modules, enhancing retail experiences with personalized recommendations in an aesthetically pleasing format.
• Experience & Experiment: Craft personalized omnichannel user journeys using Experience; experiment with A/B testing on content variations to optimize engagement..
• Metrics: Vue’s analytics dashboard tracks personalized product recommendations’ success and key performance indicators in retail, while ‘Experiment Metrics’ refines strategies through detailed reports on content variations.
  • Metrics Visualizer: Easily view and create metrics from internal and external sources, turning raw data into actionable insights for Lifetime Value, Monthly Recurring Revenue, Acquisition Channel, and more.
  • Custom Dashboards: Metrics Visualizer offers personalized hubs with over 10 preset views, allowing a comprehensive understanding of personalization efforts, from customer acquisition to retention.

Connectors 

Connectors in Vue.ai 2.0 allows users to read and write data across 200+ locations and manage it centrally.

• Configure Sources & Destinations – Pick and configure credentials for any systems used in the organization to read data from.
• Build Connections – Configure schema from the source to destination for seamless data movement.

Enterprises Get Value With Vue, Every Single Time

As we built the new, unified Vue product, we used our top learnings from the last decade as guiding principles. We wanted to ensure that every organization is able to:

• Fix ugly data and build high-quality, clean, rich, standardized business data.
• Use that high-quality data in their digital experiences.
• Understand every user at a 1:1 level and build dynamically personalized journeys for them, ensuring they find just the right content every time.

These, paired with a dedicated customer success approach, ensures that every organization stitching Vue into their systems sees ROI right from the start.

Some impact numbers we’ve seen are:

• ~25% of business revenue contributed by Vue
• 20 – 30$ ROI for every 1$ spent on us
• 75% Increased customer retention
• 40 – 60% Lift in revenue per visit
• 85% Reduced time in data organization processes

What makes Vue different?

1. Content Enrichment for a Strong Foundation – Elevate your content enrichment to new heights, revolutionizing product discovery through state-of-the-art technologies such as NLP, LLP, OCR, GANs, and Computer Vision. Our platform offers a comprehensive suite of AI models out-of-the-box, coupled with the flexibility to fine-tune configurations or develop custom AI models tailored to your specific needs.
2. AI Model Library for eCommerce Success – Access the industry’s most extensive array of pre-built AI models, meticulously optimized for key business KPIs. Enjoy the freedom to tailor and refine configurations to suit your unique requirements, in addition to the ability to craft bespoke AI models that align perfectly with your business objectives.
3. Journeys that Engage Every Shopper – Experience unparalleled 1:1 dynamic personalization that’s fueled by a wealth of buyer profile data. Our platform delivers tailored experiences that respond not only to immediate buyer intent but also to their past behaviors, ensuring each interaction leaves a lasting impact.
4. Precision Targeting at Its Finest – Harness the power of AI-driven audience segmentation to understand and engage both known and anonymous shoppers. Our sophisticated algorithms dissect and analyze shopper behavior, enabling you to target and personalize your messaging with precision.
5. Unified Data for Streamlines Business Success – Unify your product, content, and customer data under one roof, providing a centralized hub with granular controls tailored to different functions such as Sales, Marketing, and Merchandising. Experience seamless collaboration and efficiency as your teams leverage a shared dataset to drive business growth and success.

Get in touch with us here to learn how your business can grow with Vue.