Customers.com Technologies

SaaS Has Shaped the Leading Recommendations Solutions

By Ronni Marshak

In her insightful rating of what she considers to be the top five recommendations solutions on the market today, Sue Aldrich evaluates Avail, Baynote, Certona, Omniture, and RichRelevance in the following categories:

• Recommendation efficacy

• Geography, language, and target markets

• Recommendation types and structures

• Marketer’s control over recommendations

• Support in applying recommendations

• Company and product viability

But she points out that for all the vendors, SaaS has shaped the solutions by driving the focus towards business benefits and support for business goals, minimizing the importance of product maturity. As she states, “With SaaS, the burden of managing the reliability and availability of the service doesn’t fall on your shoulders. Bug fixes are instantaneous; they don’t require your efforts in distribution and installation. For recommendations solutions delivered via SaaS, maturity isn’t so much a matter of reliability as feature richness. We don’t see a downside in choosing a young solution if it contains the features and the client care that you need. We’ve watched these companies make major enhancements in just the past 12 months via continuous improvement unhampered by the packaging and release cycles of on-premise solutions.”

Thus, the SaaS model is goodness for Recommendations customers, who are not technologist, but marketers. Sue states, “The SaaS model allows vendors to approach business people (typically marketing executives), rather than IT, to make the sale. The focus of the sales conversation is business benefits and support for business people; technology and support for IT come into the discussion much later, often not until after the marketing team

has made its decision.” This allows the people who will be using the solutions to improve sales conversions to focus on the other features each of these leaders offer to select the product that is most appropriate for them and their customer base.

Read Sue's analysis:

Comparative Rating of Five Recommendations Solutions

Analysis of Relative Merits of Avail, Baynote, Certona, Omniture, and RichRelevance
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, March 31, 2011

Aldrich Review of Certona Resonance Recommendations

Last week, we published the sixth evaluation of a recommendation engine, product, or service. You can use these engines to improve both the sales effectiveness and the personalized relevance of the offers you make to customers who visit your Web site, and/or with whom you interact via email. Many of these offerings, like Certona's Resonance, are SaaS offerings. So they're low overhead and easy to integrate. You see results quickly.

Susan Aldrich has evaluated Avail, Baynote, Loomia, Omniture (from Adobe), RichRelevance, and, last week, she provides an in-depth evaluation of Certona’s Resonance. All of these evaluations are compared against Sue’s Recommendation Engine Evaluation Framework—a framework you can use to do your own evaluations.

You'll find the Resonance Recommendations service running on over 250 Web sites, including Guess, Lillian Vernon, Personal Creations, Petco, Redcats USA, and Staples.

Certona Resonance Recommendations
Automated Optimization Balanced with Granular Control
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, September 30, 2010

Omniture Recommendations

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Recommendations have become the new key to improving the electronic customer experience. Recommendation technologies are used not only to suggest other products for shoppers to consider, and to personalize email content to make it more compelling by including images of recently viewed products. Recommendation technology is increasingly being used to personalize much of the online experience, including selecting different look-and-feel templates for different segments, varying the choice of images on certain pages, adjusting navigation options, and changing the rules for selecting and ranking search results.

We expect that use of recommendations will be widely adopted in ecommerce in the coming year. The technology is available as a service, meaning that you can deploy it quickly. The impact is swift, within three to five weeks. And the impact is significant, lifting revenue ten percent and more. As more retailers use recommendations, and use them across channels to improve email and call center interactions, customers’ expectations for engaging interaction will rise. Merchants who are being cautious about recommendations will be signing up for recommendations a year hence to win back their customers. B2B marketers will eventually catch on that recommendations enable them to deliver some of the personalization that their customers have been demanding for years: only show us the items appropriate for our industry or geography, prioritize what I usually buy, prioritize our negotiated items and prices, keep my purchasing agents in the correct categories, notify me when my items are being discontinued.

Marketers are finding recommendation technology from a variety of sources, from their ecommerce platform, their search engine, recommendation engine vendors, and, as with Omniture, with a marketing suite. In our January survey, we saw that 68 percent of respondents preferred to use recommendation technology that is embedded in something they already own.

Adobe’s Omniture Recommendations marries technology for recommendations with Omniture’s Web analytics, site search, and site testing and optimization technologies. This creates a unified platform for merchants, supported by a unified service team at Omniture committed to making each merchant successful. The integration of the technology and the services make the addition of Omniture Recommendations pretty seamless for merchants in terms of day-to-day tasks, and pretty swift in terms of delivering uplift.

Omniture Recommendations
Integration with Powerful Omniture Marketing Suite
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, April 1, 2010

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