“Coveo Impact is one of the most enjoyable conferences I’ve attended – the last two years I’ve attended, I’ve come out of it feeling engaged and inspired. It’s a great forum for challenging your thinking; and I really enjoy the personal connections made.” – Coveo Impact 2019 attendee
“Awesome show this year.” – Coveo Impact 2019 attendee
“It was a great conference and hats off to the Coveo team for a great job and excellent hosting. I really enjoyed it.” – Coveo Impact 2019 attendee
Our attendees said it best. Coveo Impact 2019 is THE Coveo community event of the year – and one that just keeps getting better. We’ve leveled up in every way since launching this conference three years ago and you can expect it to get even better in 2020.
So what inspired us at Coveo Impact 2019? Check out our takeaways below.
Our Takeaways and Highlights from Coveo Impact 2019
Key Takeaway #1 – The AI-takes-all economy is here – and our customers are set up to WIN.
Louis Tetu, Chairman and CEO of Coveo, opened the conference with a rousing keynote. He explained that “we are in an era of profound change,” thanks to the impact of AI, namely by enabling relevance in every interaction.
“A million experiences for a million users is not humanly possible,” he explained. “But with AI, it is.” And our customers are using Coveo to accomplish this – and seeing a seismic impact on their key objectives.
Every customer reinforced this message, sharing profound stories of transformation and business impact. The results spoke for themselves: American Society for Quality achieved 100% reduction in service calls, and doubled clicks to conversions. SMART Technologies saw a $650k reduction in assisted support calls.
Peter Cook, VP Digital Transformation at F5 Networks, used Coveo to improve the customer experience. “Without question, we are using Coveo to drive THE most relevant experience for our customers,” Peter explained.
The stats don’t lie for Salesforce – continued growth, and flat case volume. Fantastic. #CoveoImpact pic.twitter.com/lAFSwiQRRd
— Coveo (@coveo) May 22, 2019
For Dan Cornwell, Director, eCommerce and Digital Experience at Famous Footwear, a Caleres brand, their journey to using Sitecore Commerce and Coveo has been transformative.
“The website will go beyond processing transactions to developing relationships with customers, Dan said. “Coveo brings real-time personalization based on context and history and will recommend products to serve. That personalization at scale is incredibly important. We’ve completely changed how we operate our websites.”
Key Takeaway #2 The new reality of customer experience means brands need to evolve their role in the customer journey.
CMO Mark Floisand led a panel keynote discussion “If Relevance is the Future, What Do You Need to Do Today?” alongside Brad Smith, Founder and President of Vector Business Navigation; Kimberly Ray, Senior Manager of Global Customer Experience, Teradata; and Bit Rambusch, Vice President – Dell Technologies Services.
The discussion centered on how the expectations for experiences with brands have changed. In the past, marketers and the brand were in the driver’s seat: carefully plotting and leading prospects and customers through their journey, a simple straight line.
Now, marketers and digital leaders are in the backseat, and their only role is to empower and enable customers with the content and information they need. Rather than prescribing every step, marketers and digital leaders need to watch and listen to their prospects and customers and let them take the lead.
With AI, it’s now possible. Instead of segmenting thousands and thousands of data points into a set of personas, marketers can provide a completely personalized and tailored experience for every single visitor – and your prospects and customers expect. 1:1 engagement is not optional; it’s an imperative.
Brendan Witcher, Vice President and Principal Analyst of Digital Business Strategy with Forrester Research, delivered a keynote entitled “Personalization Redefined: How Individualization is the New Bar for Relevance” that resonated well with the audience and on Twitter.
Every positive digital experience a consumer has, their expectations for all experiences has been reset to that new higher level. @BrendanWitcher VP/Principal Analyst @forrester wows the audience at #CoveoImpact #CoveoLife pic.twitter.com/tcmWMx3Spk
— ARI HOFFMAN (@arigobie) May 23, 2019
Is is personalization if you get it wrong? No, personalization is when it is relevant. Stop looking to do personalization, look for relevance. @BrendanWitcher on the stage at #CoveoImpact
— Simon Langevin (@SilaouO) May 23, 2019
“One common thread among the most admired brands: they use data-led decision making. In 2019 you need to be data led to truly be customer obsessed.” – @BrendanWitcher of @Forrester #CoveoImpact pic.twitter.com/cEMCMfpmGV
— Coveo (@coveo) May 23, 2019
Read this blog post for more on customer journey mapping.
Key Takeaway #3 AI-powered relevance is a game-changer.
This year, we were excited to announce three customers and one partner as award winners at our Coveo Community Awards. You can find out more about who won and why in our press release announcement.
We would be nothing without our partners, that’s why we are proud to announce @Perficient as the winner of the Coveo Accelerators Award for the 2019 edition of #CoveoImpact! pic.twitter.com/pTkPQe2SuD
— Coveo (@coveo) May 22, 2019
This just in, @Tableau is the winner of the @Coveo Impact Award at #CoveoImpact 2019. Join us in celebrating them! pic.twitter.com/JIwtgHUZTC
— Coveo (@coveo) May 22, 2019
For the second year in a row, @Xero has been named as the winner of the @Coveo Innovators Award for #CoveoImpact 2019! pic.twitter.com/kjZ6YJkv8f
— Coveo (@coveo) May 22, 2019
A huge congratulations to @Dell, winner of the @Coveo Industry Leader Award at #CoveoImpact 2019! pic.twitter.com/k5KUyVf96j
— Coveo (@coveo) May 23, 2019
Key Takeaway #4 The Coveo community has BIG plans in store.
This year, we let our partners and community members show off with a new event. Six partners did a five-minute demo in front of a live audience at Innovation Live! The audience decided that the Cizmar brothers were the winners at the event with their demo of howCoveo can power conversational interactions and predict user intent. As Wim Nijmeijer, host of the event, would say, “Oh yeah!”
The bottom line: the Coveo community is leading the way with innovation.
Innovation Live with #CoveoImpact and the @Raptors game 😬 energized is an understatement https://t.co/WChLGtnYP4
— Emilie McIntosh (@emilietalk) May 24, 2019
Our CTO, John Tran is currently showcasing our integration with @coveo & @drupal in the Innovation Showcase at #CoveoImpact #ImageXKnowledge #Webdevelopment https://t.co/uH7840YBnK
— ImageX (@imagex_media) May 24, 2019
Good job or Great job? @JohnCizmar explaining our NLP intention detection techniques with @coveo at #coveoimpact … great job! pic.twitter.com/iUkFQX3zLQ
— Michael B. Cizmar (@michaelcizmar) May 24, 2019
Laurent Simoneau, President, Co-founder, and CTO, shared this message as well during his keynote. The Coveo team is on a rapid pace of innovation with lots of exciting plans in store to help us better meet our enterprise customers’ needs for AI-powered relevance.
Another highlight was the introduction of our Commerce product. The crowd was wowed by how Coveo for Commerce can deliver a personalized experience to your customers – in real time – with machine learning-powered search and product recommendations.
Read more about our Coveo for Commerce solution.
Key Takeaway #5 The Coveo community is stronger than ever – and about to get even stronger.
We also shared some BIG news at the event for our community…namely that we are launching a new (online) community: Coveo Connect! Jennifer MacIntosh, Coveo VP, Customer Experience, shared the exciting news that an AI-powered, personalized experience is now available to all of our customers.
“This is bigger than a support portal of a case deflection tactic,” Jen said. “It’s an engagement strategy.”
Be on the lookout for a blog post from Jen next week with more details!
@jenmacintosh delivering our strategy for Coveo Connect at #CoveoImpact pic.twitter.com/Dm6ysrREAT
— Vicky R (@vrcoveo) May 24, 2019
One final takeaway: Coveo Impact 2020 is a must-attend event for the Coveo community. With groundbreaking keynotes, more customer sessions and great networking, we’re excited to see how we make it an even better event next year. We’ll see you there!
Want to learn more? Subscribe for updates about Impact 2020 or if you have team members in the UK or Europe – make sure they attend Impact Europe.