Ecommerce search, discovery & personalization platform

So we wanted a system and software and partners that really believed in the customer, the end customer experience, and believed in the empowerment of business users who controlled those vehicles. So Coveo fit really nicely into that same philosophy of being focused on the customer, Relevance, personalization, smooth and impressive experiences on the website that just feel easy and natural. So the ongoing support, the ongoing collaboration with Coveo day to day, week to week has been impressive. And it's really been one of the smoothest parts of our replatform project, and we're really pleased with where we're at and really excited about those first three sites. Caleres is not a customer facing name. Caleres is a portfolio company and it's pretty interesting. It consists of a retail division, which is Famous Footwear, but also a whole portfolio of shoe brands that we design, develop, manufacture, sell, mostly at wholesale, but also some of them are actually sold at Famous Footwear. It's a two point eight billion dollar company, and when it comes to e commerce, the experiences are pretty similar to what we want to have whether it's with Famous or with AllenEdmonds dot com. We're trying to really impress the customer, evoke emotion, communicate the brand, get them to believe and buy from us instead of somewhere else. As we were trying to upgrade our e commerce operations and the empowerment and the abilities of the websites, we were looking for marketing technology and partners that really embodied the prioritization of a positive experience that is more hands off and automatic than hands on and manual and rigid. And really what e commerce means to our company right now is really important. The brick and mortar business is not growing in double digits, but e commerce is. So as we're on an aging platform looking to build for not just now, but future growth, it's really important that, we have the right systems as e commerce continues to be a bigger part of Caleres' business and the website interaction and experience is a bigger part of what customers expect from an omnichannel company. On the digital space, we really need to get to a point where we can do more storytelling, have better, more modern functionality that's more consistent with what leading websites are doing in other spaces. And in general, we just have experience to get people to buy shoes from Caleres more often. The search for a platform was really a search for a new philosophy for how to move forward. So we were looking at things that empowered ecommerce teams to run their websites, to be the closest ones to the customers and the marketing channels that communicate what we're doing. Coveo is a very strategic part of that. So Coveo is not just an add on just any other vendor. It's really central to how we're powering product detail page recommendations, to how we're powering the sort and rank position, to how the filters and facets work, appear, are able to be used in conjunction, are able to be styled with Sycor Commerce. We're excited about leveraging essentially machine learning. It sounds like a buzzword. It might be a buzzword, but we believe very much in the power of machine learning, especially with the volume of visits and orders on our websites, that, we're going to be in a much better space, the customer experience will be in a much better place, leveraging these algorithms to provide better and smarter recommendations that are less manual so that we can focus more on new functionality for the website instead of fine tuning, you know, sort and hierarchy positions that are manual. That's not where we want to spend our time. We want to spend our time knowing that the website is constantly learning and improving from the volume and business it's already getting.

Digital is a focus. It had to be. That's the only way these businesses are gonna survive that we were gonna survive as a business. You know, we had to make sure that technology was in place for us to grow and, you know, to start in the b to c side and grow that into the b to b side, was very important. Experience. You know, that was a real focus on experience. There there's some beauty to our site that I love we have a really great team that spends a lot of time staring at size of buttons and color and placement to make sure that we are delivering an experience that feels, that that matches our products, you know, that that was really important. And driving, that trust, it's it's a big purchase. This is a lifetime purchase. Gonna wear this on your finger, on your ears for the rest of your life. We wanna make sure that you're comfortable with that. So we brought technology in to help us do that. And that obviously drove, you know, great conversion rates. And when we had an e commerce site for a while, it wasn't a primary focus for us with making it a focus and investing in search and investing in the technology, we've been able to do a lot with there. So the numbers are great. One of the things that I think is really interesting is we had some, you know, some big increases here bounce rates way down. Average time on page, it went up. Not a lot, but it went up. But I think there's an interesting thing there that, it only went up a little bit because we were delivering the information people needed on those pages, the relevant information. Mhmm. You know, we didn't they we didn't just serve it up and then they were lost there for a little while. We really thought about, like, what is that funnel? What is that what are we trying to do with this person and that experience that we can drive them down a path? And that made it for that eight seconds time that we have with them, the the the the the the what they needed. We got them what they needed.