Recently, during our DCKAP Summit gathering in downtown Los Angeles on October 28th, we heard from Rainey Bailey, Partner Manager at Klevu, about the importance of ensuring customer loyalty in the age of eCommerce.
Klevu discovery technology balances AI automation and strategic control to effectively connect people to the products they want to buy. Ultimately, incorporating this technology into the eCommerce experience on your site helps drive sales and sustain customer loyalty. You can watch the full session here to find out more from her presentation directly.
The Significance of Product Discovery
Product Discovery is the process of understanding how your customers are navigating your website, from the moment they first click into it, to the pathway their cursor takes once on your site. Knowing whether they’re looking for anything specific or if they have any intention and understanding why they came to your website is vital to establishing customer loyalty. Product Discovery is, at its core, the art of making the buyer’s journey seamless.
At a minimum, it’s important that buyers find what they’re looking for, no matter what their journey is. Whether that’s through a simple search, through product recommendations, or browsing through the category pages, their path needs to be simple and effective to take them where they need to go. This is especially important for B2B retailers due to the highly specific and highly specialized products that are being sold.
These days, in a post-covid world, the eCommerce industry is more crowded than ever and buyers’ expectations are high. It’s not just vital to get customers to visit your website, but it’s even more important to effectively convert them into shoppers and to ultimately maintain customer loyalty. Utilizing product discovery successfully goes beyond simply helping the customer find what they’re looking for, but also giving them ideas on what they may not even be looking for in the first place and offering your customers a new point of view.
Overcoming Product Discovery Challenges with AI-Driven Technology
We’ve passed the era of catalog orders and customers dealing directly with representatives to place orders for the products they need. On average, modern buyers do twelve online searches before a purchase is even made. To stand out from your competitors, B2B retailers need to focus on exceeding the buyers’ expectations, and that is often most effective when replicating the B2C shopping experience they are used to.
There are three common challenges that you typically face with Product Discovery, which may be causing you to lose sales if not conquered. The first is with a broad range of specialist search terms, as customers are most often coming to your site looking for brand names, specific skus, part or model numbers. This process leaves little room for error, especially if they mistype or misspell anything, and creates a high chance for customers to miss on what they’re looking for.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a technology that describes the interaction between human language and computers. We typically use this everyday in our lives, through things like spell check and auto-complete. By incorporating this technology into the search on your website, you create an advanced search engine process that can provide accurate results no matter what your customer is typing and searching for.
The second challenge is with drilling down to the very specific and unique needs of your customers. As a B2B retailer, chances are that you sell highly specialized and technical products that are not often easily found in a wide range of inventory. Customers with these search terms would benefit from AI-driven Dynamic filters. These filters automatically create the most relevant categories and display them to the customer, without leaving the search bar.
Challenge number three is the missed opportunities for cross-selling with having a large and varied catalog for customers to navigate through. It can be difficult to manually merchandise all of the products that you carry, not to mention the exorbitant amount of hours it takes your team. The best solution is to employ advanced AI and personalization tools based on the buyer’s behavior to ensure the customer experience is robust as well as seamless.
Customer retention and customer loyalty is vital to every business, and the challenges that exist around this need in the increasingly digital era of shopping can make the task seem daunting. Incorporating Product Discovery technology like this, specifically into the B2B eCommerce experience, is the next step to elevating your website, helping you to stay above your competition, and sustaining customer loyalty. It helps to drive sales and create cross-selling opportunities, ensuring that you are effectively catering to repeat buyers, and creating a personalized and seamless experience that is necessary for future success.
Don’t get left behind! Take the next step in your eCommerce transformation today, so AI-powered product discovery can change your business tomorrow.
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