AGC Catering Equipment

Camran

 

The Challenge

Australia’s largest showroom for catering and restaurant supplies, AGC Catering Equipment offers more than 50,000 products.

Selling a diverse range of new and pre-owned items, from kitchenware and crockery to glassware and cutlery, AGC supplies many of Australia’s leading restaurants, clubs, cafes, hotel, colleges, and aged care facilities.

The family-owned company has, throughout the last 30 years of operation, built up a reputation for providing superior customer service, high stock levels, and quality equipment.

Merchandising Cloud is now complementing this reliable, gold standard service on AGC’s online store, which is hosted on the Neto platform.

 

 

 

The Solution

Two Merchandising Cloud solutions, Personalized Search and Smart Collections, are now running on AGC’s site, improving the shopper journey by helping customers find their preferred items quicker and easier.

How does this Site Search and Personalization software improve the ecommerce experience?
With the Personalized Search ecommerce tool, there are two aspects – search accuracy and personalization.

Accuracy is about precision & recall – 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.

Merchandising Cloud’s fast and reliable autocomplete solution in operation on AGC’s Neto-powered store.

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.

 

The Results

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 equally dependable Smart Collections solution 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.