Precise search results with targeted recommendations improve online customer engagement

This Independent Software Vendor (ISV) is changing the way organizations find product data by creating straightforward and powerful search technologies for eCommerce leveraging the Vantiq platform. Complex product searches have many challenges: too many results (too broad), too few results, or no results (too specific). Often, searches turn up the completely wrong product. These problems create anxiety and confusion for the online shopper, often forcing them to give up on the search and move to another site or attempt to find the product offline. Industrial supply and hardware products can be among the most difficult when it comes to online discovery due to the intricacies of the products and the specificity of their uses.

Why Vantiq?

To easily add intelligent recommendations to their searches, the ISV uses Vantiq. The Vantiq recommendations and collaboration engine is unique in that it can be programmed to understand the attributes of the products consumers are searching for, as well as consumer behavior and interests. By creating a contextual concept of the product and appropriate attributes referring to it, the system can accurately identify what a consumer is searching for, evaluate what they find, and filter the results for best fit. Also, the system can offer multiple complementary products or different products that solve the same problem in the search results. These advanced and highly specialized search capabilities provide both the consumer and the merchant a unique and improved experience. Additionally, the merchant can up-sell and cross-sell additional products and services to the consumer in innovative ways such as incorporating currently-running sales campaigns into recommendations.

The Vantiq platform can also be extended to include the ISV’s consumer search results with eCommerce technologies such as click-through analysis, and then combined with other sources such as weather, location, and CRM information to deliver a full contextualized view of the customer. Based on these results, Vantiq’s recommendation service can present precise sets of “around me” products that are based on the exact situation and realtime data about the user. The result is that the consumer receives product recommendations that are much more relevant and actionable to them.

Vantiq Solution

With Vantiq, powerful and dynamic recommendations and situational rules can be updated in realtime to meet specific and ever-changing customer business needs.

This allows merchants to change the product recommendation results on the fly based on situational events such as available inventory, end of month clearance, scratch and dent and supply change disruptions.

The ability of Vantiq to deploy in a distributed cloud and/or on-premise environment is critical to meet this ISV’s worldwide customer deployment requirements.