2017 is the year of customer experience transformation.
Coveo™ had the opportunity to sit down with one of our trusted partners, Rightpoint, to learn more about how they help their clients to move from the idea of transformational CX to the reality—and how intelligent site search and web content personalization play a major role.
A customer experience agency with technology at its core, Rightpoint, drives transformational change “from the inside out.” We talked with Senior Vice President, Digital MarketingNick Laidlaw, who is the Solution Lead for CX at Rightpoint, and Director, CMS National Practice Lead,Mark Ursino, who leads delivery for clients.
Coveo: Consumers today expect relevant, personalized interactions with brands. How do you help your customers deliver this? How does Coveo help?
Mark: Companies will crawl, walk, run. Transforming digital experience starts at the foundation, the crawl phase. In this phase they’re exposed to Sitecore and how it works, and start to leverage the xDB and analytics. There is a close tie-in with Coveo, which makes the experience relevant for every website visitor. This provides customers with search results in the terms they’re using versus just wordmatching. Basically, with Coveo, the website reacts to how visitors act on the site. Especially if you are using search-driven navigation, visitors will go down different paths. Coveo AI and machine learning will surface different content to each visitor.
Also, getting things in the hands of marketers is huge. It’s a common theme, organizations are trying to put more control in the hands of marketers. Coveo fits in really well, since it’s all natively integrated in Sitecore, using the same tools and enhancing them. It allows marketers to look at CX through a lens of search as opposed to one of content.
Nick: Consumers and our customers expect personalized interactions. Rightpoint guides our customers through personalization planning with our Digital Strategy team and execution from our technology team. Coveo helps deliver relevant search results based on implicit site activity. Coveo for Sitecore is a huge opportunity for our customers, including for ecommerce sites. Typically, the search experience within Sitecore Commerce uses basic technologies to pattern match keywords. Coveo AI uses machine-learning, auto-tuning capabilities will provide site consumers with a more relevant experience leading to increased sales for our customers.
Coveo: How does cloud technology impact CX and digital transformation?
Mark: The most important aspect is compute capabilities at an entirely new scale. Some organizations feel they may not need to scale, however over time if you can’t keep up with the infrastructure, you can’t grow. Having the cloud option removes the burden of scaling, as the infrastructure will scale as you need.
As an example with Coveo™ Cloud, changing a CMS such as Sitecore is a serious change; changing search provider would be one more thing to learn to maintain. Being able to host on the cloud provides more options for customers and removes the burden on IT departments, opening a whole area for more marketing focused organizations. Coveo manages the servers, so the business can focus on their business and not on keeping the lights running.
Nick: I agree – the ability to implement intelligent search without adding to the client’s managed infrastructure is key. Our clients’ IT teams are stretched thin and they are very sensitive to adding to their responsibilities. Coveo’s cloud offering gives them the assurance that the marketing team gains the benefits of great search without increasing the IT burden. Also, Coveo Cloud is faster to implement than an on-premise solution. This helps increase speed to market for our customers.
Coveo: We can’t talk about CX without talking mobile. How does mobile search help transform CX?
Nick: Mobile search is even more critical than in the desktop experience due to the lack of screen real estate. Enhanced search UI and intuitive search results keep site visitors engaged.
Mark: Often the keyword is the context. For example, if someone searches for a bank, they really want all the banks near them, which are currently open. So you want to give them not necessarily the closest bank, but the closest bank that is open. It’s all about the context of the person searching. How long it will take me to get there is a huge factor that is often not considered. For an animal hospital website we deployed for a client, this was a major feature to consider, where are all the offices located, and when do they close. Using the Google API and Coveo, we were able to provide more relevant search results, including when you would arrive there.
Coveo: How do you see your partnership with Coveo supporting your CX Transformation work with clients?
Nick: Search is a critical aspect to a site’s customer experience. There is a really strong need for enhanced search capabilities, which are inherent in Coveo’s product offering. The feature set offered is out out-of-the-box, helping us to effect change quickly and for less expense for our customers. Otherwise, we’d have to do custom development from scratch. Our customers want that increased speed to market, it saves them time and money, so it’s a win-win-win — for us, Coveo and our clients.
Coveo’s out of the box UI components help our customers to quickly visualize and understand search possibilities. At Rightpoint, we are actively working to educate our customers and prospects about the value of relevant search results and intuitive search interfaces. Coveo allows our team to focus on optimizing the search experience faster than other search products. This is due to the fact that Coveo provides configurable search interfaces out of the box. This results in greater speed to market. With Coveo, we can quickly demonstrate the “art of the possible”.
Mark: Dedicated search like Coveo is definitely worth it. Coveo for Sitecore really made search forefront in the Sitecore solution, made it easy to switch from legacy search, and the free version also allowed us to figure out how else to leverage Coveo, without adding costs for our customers.
To me, what makes Coveo best of breed is how much comes out of the box, there are a lot of features that just work, we can use them “as is,” and build on top, compared to Lucene and Solr, or APIs that developers need to work with. Surfacing all of that directly in Sitecore, within Sitecore constructs, is also important. For marketers, it feels familiar, it feels like it’s baked into the product.
We really want to lead all new projects with Coveo. Coveo is on a trajectory; compared to other search providers, Coveo is far ahead of the curve.
Join Rightpoint in partnering with Coveo to deliver transformative customer experience for clients. Contact us to become a partner. You can also see for yourself how Coveo for Sitecore transforms by downloading the free edition and contacting our search experts to get started.