Acuity Brands Sheds Light on Customer Experience

13,000 Employees
32 Brands
14 Websites

Acuity Brands building a better search experience

Acuity Brands needed a complete digital transformation to achieve their top goals: help every customer find the products and information they needed through simple and effective site search. With a new site experience one of their top five strategic priorities, working with Coveo seemed a natural fit.

Acuity Brands’ own internal research showed that site search is their most popular tool for content discovery, and the biggest indicator of a visitor’s intent to purchase from distributors. Partnering with Coveo for customer experience solutions that prioritized relevant search just made sense for their needs.

Lighting the way to a more brilliant and connected world, Acuity Brands is the leading North American provider of lighting and building management solutions. The company employs over 13,000 associates and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. With a global annual revenue of $3.7B, it serves customers in Asia and Europe, as well.

With 5,000+ product offerings across 8 different categories, 32 brands, and 14 independent brand websites, it’s safe to say that their catalog is complex.

AI-powered search with facets

Problem: Customers needing very specific search results were getting the same search experience as someone looking to browse for inspiration.

Solution: With the combination of Coveo’s data-driven insights and search that got better over time, visitors could begin to see better and better results for the products they sought out. By selecting many facets, they could narrow down a list of very specific products or keep fewer facets selected to browse larger selections for inspiration.

↑12%

Click‑through behavior after 1 month for Sitecore 5.1

Cross-Brand Search

Problem:Customers searching on one site were finding zero search results for an out-of-stock product, even if that product could be found on another brand site.

Solution:By cross-linking the site search experience across web properties, Acuity Brands could show visitors results for other websites in place of “no results.” Customers don’t feel the disappointment of not getting solutions to their searches, and Acuity Brands has a fresh opportunity to cross-sell between web properties.

↑42%

Click‑through behavior after 6 months for Sitecore 3.0

Great customer experience
from actionable insights

Acuity Brands’ new search experience returns results in under three seconds, even on mobile and small monitor sizes. Visitors can quickly download spec sheets and compare products, right from the results page. Facets and views help visitors narrow the vast catalog of products to just what they want, whether it’s inspiration or a particular product.

Coveo was able to get the new digital customer experience ready in just five months, with results improving immediately upon deployment. Acuity Brands is looking forward to continuing to exceed customer expectations. With information about what visitors are searching for, such as post-sale warranties and user information, they aim to add more functionality and content to the search to meet even more touchpoints in the customer journey.

Take a look inside

How Acuity Brands uses Coveo to move from bad customer data to actionable insights that help them meet customer needs. (Page 4)
Why moving from 16 different code bases to a single source of truth made search simpler and enabled a more powerful digital experience. (Page 5)
How Acuity Brands uses search data and site experience analytics to fill content gaps and proactively deliver better customer service. (Page 7)