Blog Archives

• RETAIL SEGMENT: B2B, IT Products and Solutions
• PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations, Personalized Browse and Navigation
• CHALLENGE: With 100,000+ products, 1,000+ partners and 5,000+customer-facing trusted advisors, CDW needed to effectively connect a diverse set of customers with the right items, ancillaries and servicesto meet their unique business goals.
• RESULTS: RichRelevance’s personalization solution allows CDW to deliver an engaging, immersive and relevant customer experience tailored for industry, company and individual role, as well as unique goals and preferences

Founded in 1984, CDW is a leading multi-brand technology solutions provider to business, government, education and healthcare organizations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The company is ranked #199 on the Fortune 500 with nearly $15 billion in annual sales. Challenge CDW has a strong reputation for bringing together both technology and unrivaled expertise to solve organizational challenges and build IT solutions that companies need to succeed. With more than 100,000 products (from over 1,000 leading and emerging technology partners) ranging from discrete hardware and software to integrated IT solutions, CDW’s customers rely on the brand for ongoing strategic advice and proactive problem solving.

To deliver on this value proposition, CDW must create and sustain a personal connection with each client – from the first engagement throughout the entire customer journey. This includes delivering the most valuable and relevant customer journey online, in email and across the digital experience – as well as through personto-person consultation via dedicated account managers who work directly with customers across diverse industries and vertical markets.

This high-touch approach requires a detailed understanding of each customer’s history with CDW and their role within the customer organization, as well as immediate goals, preferences and requirements. It is not enough to simply anticipate customer needs and ensure the compatibility of products; CDW must also continually adjust for things like changing inventory and co-marketing agreements while also connecting customers with the right services to support their solution.

Solution

RichRelevance’s proven personalization solution allows CDW to bring together pertinent data and systems around every customer to provide the most relevant, memorable experience in every sales channel. The RichRelevance solution identifies and understands both implicit and explicit preferences, and leverages product compatibility and services attributes to deliver the best possible guidance [alt: experience] to customers. By optimizing personalized search results and recommendations – from email to the home page through the shopping cart – each individual has a unique experience tailored specifically to them.

Within this experience, CDW has advanced control over merchandising to ensure customers are connected to complementary products, services and accessories from strategic partners. In addition, CDW’s sales support and dedicated account managers gain access to individualized product and services suggestions in real time to improve service levels and add value to every call center interaction.

How it Works

Every digital experience is dynamically generated in real-time based on comprehensive data on products, services, individual and account history and omnichannel transactions and behavior (online, email, call center, others). RichRelevance’s advanced machine learning automatically selects the best-performing algorithm for a particular interaction out of 125+ personalization strategies. Real-time signals are fed back into the personalization engine to allow the experience to evolve and adapt in real time to changing preferences, contexts and needs.

The RichRelevance personalization solution is built on a fully customizable, enterprise-class architecture that prioritizes scalability, agility and flexibility in order to make personalization work for CDW’s customers. RichRelevance currently delivers over 1 billion decisions a day with industry leading speeds and uptime – a must-have for CDW’s customers.

Results

CDW has established a long-term partnership with RichRelevance based on the value that personalization provides to its customers and its business. This includes continually adding new data sources as fuel for improved personalization, as well as expanding the number of personalized touchpoints offered to customers.

As CDW’s growth outpaces the US IT market, the company has seen measurable increases in sales and engagement as it connects customers to the right products and services. These include: 

• Significant increases in both cross-sell attach rate and average order value 
• Improved operational efficiency and merchandising effectiveness 
• Improved product awareness and conversion through onsite search by delivering more relevant results

CDW continues to innovate personalization aided by a dedicated personalization expert from RichRelevance who provides strategic advice and thought leadership gleaned from other industries. CDW continually evaluates and evolves every aspect of its personalization strategy including: what and how to test; optimizing personalized placements; instrumentation and technical aspects. RichRelevance’s guidance also extends to data science advancement to develop new personalization strategies, such as custom segmentation specific to CDW’s B2B framework.

“RichRelevance and personalization are an essential part of our effort to take the power of our products and make them work for our customers,” said CDW. “We bring together the very best performing and most relevant products and services to unlock value for our customers at every engagement – whether replacing a laptop or bringing a new restaurant online. Personalization is essential to providing the best possible experience to our customers and RichRelevance is a valued, long term partner in helping us achieve this goal.”

• SECTOR: Marketplace
• SOLUTION: Personalized Product Recommendations
• CHALLENGE: With a wide array of partners and product offerings notonthehighstreet.com needed a personalization tool to help improve the customer experience by connecting shoppers with the most relevant products.
• RESULTS: 25% order value (from those interacting with Recommend™)

Notonthehighstreet.com is an online marketplace with 5,000 partners and a wide array of product offerings. Since they were founded over 10 years ago, demand for their unique, personalized products has continued to rise, with their customer base seeking bespoke and unique products compared to the mass produced offerings on the high street.

For notonthehighstreet.com personalization is a particularly important part of improving the customer experience. As a marketplace with such a broad product range and partner base, notonthehighstreet. com customers have very different shopping missions that range from top ticket items like large furniture pieces to Alpaca walking experiences in Derbyshire. With a mission to make every customer interaction as unique and enjoyable as possible, notonthehighstreet. com was looking for a personalization tool to help them connect the most relevant and appropriate product to each shopper.

After looking at whether they could develop a tool internally, notonthehighstreet.com turned to RichRelevance’s personalization platform to automate connecting customers with the right products.

“We chose the RichRelevance solution due to the flexibility and depth of personalization it gave us, dovetailing into our own product curation needs. We also liked the unobtrusive nature of the RichRelevance offering and the way it integrated seamlessly, complimenting the customer journey”, explained Michael Roberts, Senior Merchandiser at notonthehighstreet.com.

“The RichRelevance system is an AI based self learning tool, so the personalization takes care of itself automatically. A dashboard is provided which is easy to use and has powerful reporting and merchandising features built in. This means I can set high level guidelines to refine the recommendations when I need to – for instance when I want special promotions for Mother’s Day or Valentines Day.”

Since implementing Recommend™, notonthehighstreet.com found the personalization tool has provided them with insight into their customers’ behavior leading to the ability to highlight interesting new products within their offerings that the shopper might not have found otherwise. This capability is particularly important on mobile.

“With the advance of mobile shoppers whose browse times are much shorter on notonthehighstreet.com, the value of tools such as RichRelevance has increased dramatically, as they allow us to promote relevant product visuals to customers quickly and easily”, said Michael Roberts.

RichRelevance personalized product recommendations have high exposure across the notonthehighstreet.com website, with placements on the homepage, department pages, the bottom of listing pages and across checkout and add to basket pages. They help the shopper at every stage of their shopping journey.

Since notonthehighstreet.com deployed RichRelevance Recommend in 2015 they have seen steady improvements and many benefits both on conversion rates and incremental gain in sales. The AOV of orders interacting with personalized recommendations are 25% higher than those who don’t, showing the value and relevance of the suggestions being made. A total of 11% of orders on notonthehighstreet. com now interact with RichRelevance recommendations.

Notonthehighstreet.com has also been able to utilize RichRelevance personalization software to overcome specific challenges, for example a high bounce rate from search engine traffic, as Michael explained:

“We were struggling to immediately engage with traffic arriving from search engines, where we had a high bounce rate compared to the overall site. We utilized the RichRelevance technology to show very relevant product alternatives at the right time specifically for this source of traffic and as a result reduced our bounce rate by an impressive 13%.”

In terms of the future, notonthehighstreet.com sees personalization of the shopping journey as continuing to play an integral role in the way they deliver the right products to the right customers, alongside promoting new products and supporting their valued partners.

“RichRelevance has the features right now that we need to deliver our vision to focus on the needs of our individual customers and deliver them a great shopping experience.” Michael concluded.