The Solution
Forever tech for the forever furniture company
The latest step in Icon by Design’s admirable journey lies in its recent integration of Merchandising Cloud’s site search and personalization software solutions.
Merchandising Cloud’s full suite of Personalized Search, Recommendations, and Smart Collections is now live on Icon by Design’s website (which is hosted on the Neto platform), helping customers of the store find their preferred items quicker and easier.
The autocomplete function, which forms part of the Personalized Search solution, in operation for Icon by Design.
How does Site Search and Personalization software work?
With Personalized Search, there are two aspects – search accuracy and personalization.
Accuracy is about making the search as smart as possible so that it can return relevant results to the customer putting in the query. This includes an autocomplete, predicting what they will type as they’re typing, meaning fewer keystrokes for the user.
Other aspects include Natural Language Processing – the search being able to tell the difference between products, like a table, a chair, or a sideboard, and attributes, like the colour red.
An effective search should also include spelling tolerance, ensuring customers get relevant results even if they make a typo, and a zero results workaround – ensuring relevant products come up even if the exact query searched for is not present.
Personalization, then, is all about the AI algorithm which analyzes the behaviour of the customer and learns, in real time, what their preferences are – search results are ranked in order of preference. So, if the algorithm learns the shopper has a preference for items made out of oak, or has a preference for a certain style of furniture, this is what they will see more of.
Merchandising Cloud’s Recommendations solution also draws on these learnings, but in order to increase upsell and cross-sell capabilities – using designated space to highlight products the shopper is most likely to buy.
Smart Collections, then, takes all the same aspects as Personalized Search and applies them to collection pages to ensure products appearing within collections are ranked according to the customer’s preference, and are not simply a one-size-fits-all static list of products.
