Customers.com Technologies

Aldrich Review of Loomia Recommendation Engine

Susan Aldrich is our long-time search, findability, and merchandising expert. For the past two years, she has been focusing her attention on recommendation engines. That's because these platforms have become an incredibly versatile tool for both B2C and B2B marketers. Once used primarily to boost sales on a Web site (other people who bought this, also bought this), recommendations are now used to provide a personalized experience to small groups of customers, or even to individuals. They are used to support outbound email marketing and other campaigns. They are used to support multi-channel interactions. They are used to provide personalized Web experiences, and to improve navigation. And they are used to ensure that the offers you receive — whether via email or Web serendipity — are the ones you are most likely to welcome and act upon.

This month's in-depth product review is of the Loomia Recommendation engine which is available as a SaaS offering. Loomia's customers include the Wall Street Journal, ABC.es, Thomson Reuters, Time, Harvard Business Review, Travelocity, Fancast, DailyCandy.com, BlogTalk Radio, Audible, and Panasonic.

One criticism Sue has for this current implementation of Loomia is that it doesn't yet support customer segmentation. On the other hand, there's a lot you can do using the built-in business rules and analytics. Another drawback is that there are few tools for marketers to do the tweaking themselves. On the plus side, Loomia is a full service organization and does a good job of continuously tweaking their clients' recommendations to generate better and better results for customers and for clients.

Here is Sue's product review:

Loomia Recommendations
Customized Solutions for Deep Content, Video, and Ecommerce
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, August 19, 2010

Recommendations: Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform

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

Baynote is the fourth in our series of recommendation solution evaluations using our Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 1. The first three solutions we reviewed, Avail Behavioral Merchandising, RichRelevance, and Omniture Recommendations, have an ecommerce focus, especially retail ecommerce. Baynote is tackling a much broader market, targeting telecommunications, media, and manufacturing, and also digging into applications such as search and navigation, customer service, customer support, intranets and extranets.

In the customer experience realm, retailers tend to be in the lead in technology, and recommendations are no exception. So it’s no surprise that people think of recommendations as a commerce function: “other people like you who looked at this, ultimately bought that.” But recommendations have the potential to provide the core technology for simple personalization. Simple, at least, for the Web teams in charge of implementing and the marketers in charge of managing. So Baynote’s broader focus certainly makes sense in terms of market needs, and the company’s success with retailers indicates that their technology and services are definitely competitive.

Investing in Personal Recommendations

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

Recommendations are hot—just ask the vendors of recommendation solutions. Recommendations are hot—according to the potential buyers we surveyed early this year. All of our respondents are interested in deploying recommendations at some point, and almost half plan to deploy in the next 18 months.

What are recommendations for? That's a simpler, and possibly harder question. Our respondents have clearly heard the message that recommendations help revenue and improve the customer experience. Interestingly, most North American respondents also see recommendations as a tool for personalization—for the user experiences of both customers and employees. Europeans, famously less exuberant [though not, as we see from the financial news, more rational] think the jury is still out on personalization.

Exuberant Americans will take their recommendation technology any way it's served: home grown, commercial on-premise software, or SaaS. Europeans, who shipped most of their cowboys westward over the past three centuries, do not want any home grown software, thank you very much; leave that "do it my way" impulse to the cowboys. Our European respondents really just want recommendations technology the way technology is supposed to be delivered, via commercial on-premise software. That SaaS thing, hmm, not so sure about that. This reluctance is a shame—what could be better than having a vendor striving to win your love and esteem daily? Even after you sign the contract? The beauty of SaaS, with the loving client care, ease of implementation, and low up-front cost will win the skeptics over eventually.

Venda Enterprise: SaaS Ecommerce Platform

I just reviewed Venda Enterprise, the ecommerce platform from NY-based Venda. Venda targets brand-conscious retailers and businesses selling direct to consumers with annual online revenues from $5 million to $100 million. To date, 140 of them have deployed their stores—hosted multi-tenant/SaaS style—on the platform. Many of Venda’s customers do not have large technology organizations. Business users can configure and do most of the set up for their Venda ecommerce sites. You’ve got to consider it seriously if you’re an online retailer.

I found an advantage to SaaS deployment in my research on Venda Enterprise. In addition to using the product documentation, speaking with customers, and speaking with developers, product marketing managers, and executives, I got “hands-on” the product. Venda gave me credentials to access a sample site that was a replica of the BBC shop. I used the Venda Control Panel (VCP) to create and modify categories and products, to manage promotions, to build Web pages—all the tasks that administrators and merchandisers perform to deploy and maintain a Venda Enterprise site. The experience took me back to when I installed and used every product I evaluated—RDBMS, app dev tools, and ecommerce platforms.

I found Venda Enterprise to be a very appealing platform. It supports most of the ecommerce activities that customers want to perform with packaged, configurable, or easily customizable services and data. It packages a wealth of the mechanisms that merchandisers need to influence customer behavior, not only the promotions and content targeting that we’ve come to expect, but also a recommendation engine and facilities to support affiliates and referrals. Venda Enterprise also packages an almost-complete Web content management system that includes a very large set of reusable Web content items. Web content developers might not be needed to deploy a store.

The platform is not perfect. It's missing reports that you need to monitor, analyze, and refine its rich services and merchandising. Also, it doesn’t support customer segments very well.

My evaluation is more than sixty pages long. Don’t be daunted. It contains the information and analysis that you’ll need to evaluate Venda Enterprise. Here’s my approach. First, I state the ecommerce requirements for supporting customer activities and merchandising activities. Next, I describe and then analyze the platform’s services, data, content, and customizable facilities that address those requirements. The result is a complete, comprehensive, and actionable evaluation. I take the time to understand the product. I don’t ask vendors to fill-out feature-function questionnaires. I don’t rely on their demos. I prove everything we state. No generalizations. No unsubstantiated statements. No fluff.

Venda Enterprise
Excellent Merchandising and Customer Service with SaaS Deployment for Retailers
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, February 11, 2010

http://www.customers.com/Venda_Enterprise.aspx

Can Your Customers EASILY Find and Buy the Right Stuff Online?

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

In the past 12 months, we've watched our clients who were unhappy with how difficult it was to get the right items in front of their customers take very different paths to achieve their customer acquisition and sales conversion goals.

We saw one client opt for SEO services to bring all visitors to exactly the right page – no site search and navigation required.

Another client chose a recommendation platform to bypass their site search inadequacies. They didn't want to replace several search engines providing keyword and part number search on the site, and they recognized that metadata was never going to keep pace with customer terminology.

A third client took the traditional approach of replacing a simplistic keyword-match site search with an ecommerce-focused search solution, selecting an offering that comes with what the vendor describes as a marketing suite: recommendations, targeted ads and emails, and SEO.

A fourth client continues to struggle with ineffective search, because as she says, "We have an ecommerce platform, and we all pretend to believe it will do everything for ecommerce. So there is no chance of augmenting the parts that perform poorly for us, such as search."

The first three are pleased with their results, noting that customers are getting a much better experience and that the Web site is contributing more to business results.Does this mean that search, navigation and discovery are no longer the leading mechanisms for marketing and for streamlining the customer experience?

This is the question we address in our Pocket Guide to Tools for Acquisition and Conversion.