Hello, and welcome. We're gonna give a few minutes just for everyone to join the webinar today. Okay. I'd like to get started today. I wanna welcome everyone to our round table webinar building your business case for search. Today, we are here with our two speakers are lovely Lisa's. We have Lisa Greyston, our GM of e commerce, and Lisa Doll, our senior business value advisor. And myself, I'll be your moderator. My name's Courtney Christianson, and I'm with the marketing team for e commerce. Today, we'll be covering the building your business case for search, the value of search in B2B. And I'd like to introduce you to Lisa Grayson, who's going to kick it off and talk a little bit about e commerce. But before turning it over to her, just wanted to let everyone know that if you have any questions at any point, please use the chat function. I'll be your moderator and I'll read them aloud to the panelists at the end of our presentation. So Lisa Graceen Coveo to you. Thank you very much, Courtney, and hello, everyone. I'm very excited about the topic of today's webinar. E commerce plays such a critical part in today's B2B buying and selling ecosystem. And we at CoVille aim to help and equip our customers for that journey by revolutionizing, the way organizations handle data through our a powered relevant solutions. We do strongly believe that search is more than just finding information. It's about understanding user intent. It's about providing accurate and relevant search results and delivering high quality personalized customer experiences. This is particularly critical in the b to b space where the reality is that today, business can be easily lost to marketplaces and competitors, between businesses or having a tough time adding value, creating seamless experiences for their users, and driving brand loyalty as well. Business relationships are hard won and subpar site experiences do tend to lose trust and loyalty quite easily. I think it's, longer gone are actually times of the complex and cumbersome B2B websites that the same customers are technical or seasoned customers highly experienced buyers with plenty of time and patience on their hands to an earth. The desired and the right products while seeding through mountains of content products. Variable pricing, inventory constraints, product specifications, instructions, and what what else not. In today's world, the reality is that the lines between b to b and b to c customer experience expectations are starting to blur out. We see the b to b buyer journey is becoming in B2B, as well as in B2C, unsurprisingly, I would say, to most of us that buy online. But the trick here is that this slick user experience translates roughly into fifteen seconds. That's the equivalent two may be three searches and quick glances at the top results rendered by that search. That is literally the average length of time that a customer will spend on a website looking for the right product before they decide to abandon it and look elsewhere. This is why a powerful search platform that uses efficiently and leverages AI and machine learning becomes not just the need, but a critical must have for a b to b business to ensure that most vertical products and content are available and will surface first when the buyer wants it. And b to b businesses really don't have it easy. There are quite a few key challenges that such businesses face. Such as large and complex catalogs with millions of products than with thousands of price variations for each single product. We see that a typical and standard approach of flattening catalog information that renders billions of combinations just simply does not work. It does not cut it for b to b businesses. And then those millions of products will have a huge amount of content associated with them. The ability to search or partial information, but with a high degree of success at returning the right products becomes a must have. Yet we also see b b to b businesses struggling with heavy reliance on manual rules, which prevent businesses from actually being truly agile and adaptable to fast changing markets and competition conditions. Search tends to be hard to use, cumbersome to set up, requires high madness from business users ongoing. And in return, makes it hard for buyers to easily and accurately find desired products. Visibility into long tail or profitable products, also very limited, and even transparency over real time inventory and local availability poses huge challenges to b to b companies. And B2B businesses do need significant revenue uplifts. They need to continuously drive operation efficiencies. They need to optimize their margins and with eighty to almost ninety percent of customers online using the search box on a b to b website A highly relevant, highly scalable, and able to handle high complexity search is key, having a direct impact on outcomes in conversions in revenue per visit, in customer satisfaction, and self-service success. All these complexities make the digital transformation in b to b, particularly challenging. Convincing and getting your management team on board with such a transformation is really not an easy task, and I acknowledged adequately. It's just as tricky in finding the right time to embark upon such a journey as well as to articulate accurately and with a high degree of confidence the value that can be unlocked and the return on investment to secure the all needed exact buy in. There is no denying that search and findability are key, and companies with advanced search capabilities tend to have two times conversion rates than ones with basic search functionality. More often than not, companies embark in such initiatives reactively, being dragged into this. Sometimes as a response to market or business or competition pressures, But businesses risk choosing solutions that do not always address nor successfully handles those challenges and complexities resulting in costly and time consuming initiatives, which also risk missing the mark on specific tailored needs that are unique to that specific business. This is why it is so critical, for a B2B company to do the right due diligence and understand where value can be unlocked and can be delivered from in order to adapt to transform, grow, and be successful no matter the constraints and the challenges it's based. It. And speaking of unlocking and improving value, I'm happy that we have also Lisa Dow with us. Today on the webinar. She is our, senior business value advisor, and she's here to talk about how Coville helps our customers understand and tackle this due diligence and be able to prove business value. Hi, Lisa? Thank you, Rita. Perfect. So at Coveo, you know, our business value team works with, existing or prospective clients to articulate the value proposition of AI powered search and personalization. We see now more than ever, as Lisa mentioned, you know, IT investment decisions influenced, if not gated by ROI analysis. So our goal is really to work closely with our clients to help, build that artifact to help prioritize and, and solidify and and the the positioning of a AI powered search and recommendation project. Okay. So the way we're organized at Coveo, our business value team organized by use case. So we wanna be able to get deep into the details of how Coveo moves the needle moves the needle across the business area. So we're organized. I focus on b to b commerce we have b b to c commerce. So while they're both looking at e commerce more broadly, there are specific, nuances to keep in mind between b to b and b to c. And we have also, a colleague specializing in service, website, and workplace use cases, as well as, another colleague that focuses on all of our use cases, but for Europe, Middle East and Asia. Okay. So we can we can actually jump to the next slide and talk a little bit about the process. Okay. So our process is threefold, and you'll notice a little fourth one that spans across. So, essentially, how we build our business value assessments with our clients is we start with a discovery call. We start by understanding their current reality. We wanna really narrow in on, you know, where the biggest areas for improvements are, where the biggest pinpoints are and which value drivers we do have a a a long list of value drivers that we can impact through, Cavell implementation, but we wanna really prioritize on the ones that are of most critical importance for our clients. Once that's done and we kind of have a good idea and the scope to follow through with, we move over to establishing our baseline. The idea here is also to build a business value assessment or business case that truly represents our client's reality that's precise, that's accurate, that's realistic, something that they can take in internally to their stakeholders with, that confidence in knowing that this is realistic and it's definitely achievable. Once we have, the the scope figured out, we move into establishing the baseline. We share a data request feet is pretty simple to to to fill up, but we do know that in B2B, it's pretty complicated sometimes to extract, key data points for e commerce performance. So our model is built to be adaptable, to be flexible, and we can definitely accommodate data gaps where we're needed. Once we have established the baseline and we have this, again, an even better understanding of your current reality, we can move over to defining our uplift. So here, when we'll walk through the different value drivers, the uplift assumptions, the ranges that we can see in terms of the magnitude of the impact that we can have, We are able to turn the value drivers that we've prioritized mixed in with that baseline data and those uplift assumptions. We can actually quantify what the business outcome is gonna be in dollar figures. So this is where we typically build one or two scenarios, but this is where you're able to walk away with clear understanding of the impacts to your top line, impact to in terms of operational efficiency, impacts at your bottom line, and we can build an ROI. This is something also that, we can scale up or down depending on our client's requirements internally. So whatever your investment process is, for for getting that green light, we can scale our process to to equip you with exactly the right artifact that you will need, to to fulfill that process. At the bottom, what you see is, a business value realization. So, essentially, once we're live, so the investment has been greenlit. You have your BBA Once you're live, we actually go back and track the value that's been delivered. This is key for two different reasons. So first, you're able to then turn back your internal stakeholders and actually show the value that's been, that's been achieved. But also for Coveo, it helps us refine our assumptions. So we're continuously rev revising our model. We're continuously tweaking it. We wanna make sure that we take into consideration the reality that our installed base sees especially in B2B because from one business model to another, things could look fairly different. But also as the product evolves and as there's new, releases and new functionalities that come that come out, we wanna make sure that RBVAs truly reflect the latest and greatest in terms of what Coveo can do. And move to the next one, So not long ago, we had the chance to publish a blog post on the business case for, value, the business case for certain b to b. In there, we kind of went straight to it. We talked about the key value drivers. We talked about the magnitude of the impact. Today, we're gonna get into a little bit more detail on each of those. But the the the message is the same. We'll impact top line. We'll impact mark margin optimization, but then there's also value to be driven on the operational efficiency side. That's not always so straightforward. So something to look into with a bit of a difference, a bit of an open mind because you know, there are effects that will trickle down from the the your your buyer's interaction with your search platform and personalization. That will trickle back into your back office. So we can move into the next line. We'll all get into the the specific specifics for each. And I think the link for the blog post is also in the presentation, and we can we can talk about that after. But in terms of the value themes, Again, these are not exhaustive. This is what we typically typically see. The percentages, keep in mind are art of the possible. So the idea is that We have these big ranges that cover most of our of our client's realities and most of what we see through our install base But for each and every business value assessment, we're actually gonna refine that based on our client's starting points. So, again, with the idea that we want the business value meant to be representative and realistic and something that we can truly stand behind confidently, we'll wanna go through each of these value drivers and week to make sure that we're taking into consideration your starting point, your maturity level, the functionalities that you already have, some strategic imperatives that you might have that are gonna be running in parallel to this type of project. So all of those things make it so that each and every one of our business value assessments are very much tailor made. Resting on the the notion that the ranges are, seen throughout our hundreds of, of, BBA's that we've completed. So if we look at the value drivers on the left, those talk to top line and margins. And we'll I'll get into some of considerations to have because they're not super straightforward, but they're not too complex either. And then on the right, we'll talk about operational efficiencies. Or the main main main driver in our campaigns, and this is the one that pulls the most weight. We talk about improved conversion rates. So three to fifteen percent. At first, it might seem, it might seem pretty big, especially in B2B where conversion is already a bit higher than we see in B2C. But the idea here is that conversion is primarily influenced through this improved search that will be de delivered. So we really only apply that to the percentage of sessions or the subset of sessions that engage with search. And while you'll see that there is overlap and search could influence AOV, recommendations can influence conversion. We like to keep the two distinct, and we wanna make sure that we don't double count or we don't kind of confuse the two. We like to keep them distinct and and isolated, although we know that this understates the total value that we drive. In terms of increased average order value, this one, we model on sessions with recommendations. So complimentary products, alternate alternative products that are able to maintain that relevancy and just understand the user intent and really bring in that product that makes the most sense at that time. And what we see there is basket size in increasing. We model a one to five percent. But again, this will have a lot to do with, understanding our client's variability in terms of the types of orders that are being placed by their clients and, customer behaviors throughout. The next one, which is improved margin per order, this one is interesting because for a select group of of clients that we deal with, where they have equivalent products from perhaps different matters or different brands or different product categories that contribute a different margin for an equivalent product, we're able to actually boost the product that drives the most margin without impacting relevancy. So again, The idea being we want search and recommendations to be as powerful as possible, but if we're able to also drive for improved margin, we will. I'm just gonna pause here for a second before. Alright. On the right where we when we talk about operational efficiency, there's a few things to keep in mind. The first is, the cost to serve. So we'll talk about cost to serve for online orders. So the improved finability and the improved online experience I'm gonna pause here for one second just to clear my code. Okay. Sorry about that. So The reduced cost to serve for online ordering, what we see is that in the improved online experience, the improved findability. I mean, improved overall autonomy for clients on the B2B side will result in less reliance on agents to support placing an order online. So what we see is a twenty to forty percent reduction in support cases created specific to online ordering. And there how the benefit is quantified or monetized is actually due to cost of processing each those support cases. So this is where it's interesting. We work with customer, support organizations to understand what that that looks like, and we're able to actually bring that into the VV year. The next one is similar. So it's the reduced cost to serve offline. So through the improved online experience, what we see is that there is a shift. In orders from offline to online channels. And there, what we're we're able to monetize is actually the cost of processing that offline order being removed. We're not saying we're shifting. We're recognizing revenue in a new channel. The revenue is there to begin with. We're really looking at the cost to to process that order and taking that out. The last one, so with the reduced manual and tactical search management. So this is where with a tool like Coveo, the amount of tactical manual activities that a search management team or an e com team will have to to to drive is actually much lower because of the autonomy of the tool, the intelligence as being broadly. So what we see is a fifty to eighty percent reduction in that effort, and this translates into, you know, closing content gaps, creating business roles around synonyms, etcetera. So all of that kind of weight is we're able to remove that and then we can repurpose that, that efficiency or that we can repurpose that effort onto more strategic or more value adding activities for your team. We can move to the next one. So that's great. Thank you very much, Lisa, and Lisa, for that. We're gonna move into a few questions with our expert team now. So these will pull up a few slides. We have some slides with comments and some questions, I will turn on to a little bit more of a discussion with Lisa Doll and Lisa Greyston. I have to say that I love the fact that we're two Lisa's. I think I'll pick this one up. So, fifty one percent of buyers say that their research that they research their purchases online before making a purchase offline. I would hate to disagree with this to a statistic. The reality is that people discover products in different ways. And they can generally be split largely into two main groups of shoppers on a buy on a browse to buy Spectrum. You have shoppers, that are browsing. So they need guidance. They recommendations tailored to them individually. They basically need help with inspiring discovery. And then at the opposite end of the spectrum, You have shoppers and wires that know exactly what they want. They want to get there fast and accurately, and they want the information as fast as possible. They want to be able to go through the buying journey as fast as possible. More. A good search experience, especially one that leverages content relevant to the products research. Can push browsing shoppers from the browsing spectrum all the way to the buy end of the spectrum. It provides users with the relevant product that instantly have that biofuel. And with a subpar search experience, that only holds them, potential customers into, researching phase and can cause people to abandon the site and move on to maybe different other, source for buying those purchases. I think for B2B in particular, it's so important to marry the product with also the content, hence why what Lisa was saying is important to increase the visibility and, the the touch points between users and the right products at the right time with the right content associated for it so that you can actually help secure those those customers and transform them from their browsing journey into an actual buying journey on-site. I'm gonna jump in this into this one. So I think, if we go back to the the overlap between researching online and then purchasing offline. This is something that we typically would assume for b to c, where, very often, you know, there's that in that that that relationship between online and brick and mortar. I'm gonna say I'm gonna try to say this without without choking, but The interesting thing here is that in b to b, this also translates, between online channels and offline channels. And one thing that we we've seen, which was a bit of a of a surprise, is online research, being able to to influence, transactions that could go through EDI channels, for example, So where it's non repeat orders that are being discovered or that they're being researched online, and then the transaction out actually flows through a different channel. Yeah. Other pieces also for EDI, which was interesting because of the size of the channel for for B2B around, repeat orders that would drop out for example, customers that had a punch out functionality, and then that would redirect their clients back to an online experience. So something to keep in mind, how we typically model this in the DBAs is an offline halo effect. And this could also translate into offline orders that go through, you know, traditional offline channels like fax, emails, you know, sales reps or or whatnot. So there is that that that linkage to to that we should keep in mind. And it could be pretty significant because most of our B to B clients still show a digital penetration that's pretty low. So whatever influence you can have on the offline channel is gonna have that that, you know, that just from the sheer magnitude of the channel will have a significant impact on your business case. That's very interesting. That's very stingy. So I also do think that the offline of that conversion between the offline to online can be addressed I mentioned content as well, being able to generate the right content that helps that research and that that that entire journey and highlighting the right product. I think it's much more useful rather than just having the research done on a separate website or on a separate source. And then having to go straight to the to the wire portal online to make that purchase. So, yes, that's that's very true and interesting across how you border the two, how you basically bridge the two together. Do you have another question, Courtney, by chance? Nothing just right now, but we can move on to our next slide. We see sixty one percent of sellers said they lost sales because their site search wasn't enough. Lisa Sedal, I believe you maybe have some comments on this slide here. And I think we we talked about this. Like the obvious improvement that we can expect from improving search. We we tie it in our BBA's to conversion. So again, improving your top line. But one thing to keep in mind, and I I tried to tie it to operational efficiency, although my call wasn't letting me, but, either are kind of secondary effects that that we should be considering and around operational efficiency. The first is know, when we talk about no result searches or or unsuccessful searches, there is an effort after to go include the content gaps and make sure that there perhaps we don't even have analytics around what what what's going on there. So there is an improvement around just managing the search engine and optimizing performance and the experience for the users. The other piece also is that how when we talk about online orders being, having to resort to an agent or to help from an agent to be able to complete it, when we improve that search and we improve product, findability, and and TALisa's point, we can improve content, findability. We can make that whole experience, complete, and we can make our or the buyers autonomous and independent, then you do have the that workload that's kind of being alleviated from your support organizations. So it's not to be, not to be ignored because it could be pretty big in some cases. We see five to ten percent of online orders, creating or cases being created for five to ten percent of of online orders. And as need to be our our clients, we see that they wanna shift more and more sales to their online channels and something to keep in mind because five to ten percent is not insignificant. So I think the the the idea here is there are impacts that are kind of straight line and and, you know, obvious. There are some that you kinda need need to dig a little bit deeper to understand. But once you're once you're there and once you uncover, it's it could be pretty surprising. Thank you. And moving on to our next slide over here. I won't read out the full quote, but I will turn that over to Lisa Graston to talk a little bit more about it. Oh, well, it's costs, costs, costs, costs, and it's such an a critical element for a b to b to actually direct on costs. We at Coveo really do understand very much, entire buyering journey. We are we our platform, our AI relevance platform can power both external customer facing, as well as internal sales and customer support experiences. So we're very much aware of the friction that exists between, sub car or a non optimal search experience and then a purchase done by a customer, which ends in extensive, support calls extensive back and forth between the customer and the company to try to identified, various points, actually, very points of friction, either that, order is not. The item is not the right one or It is delayed for the process. They wanted to return because it's not the it's not what they would have wanted to order or is the incorrect product that they've ordered accidentally because they did not have enough information to begin with. So I think that entire process It's quite important to nail down and to drive out the friction for the customers to avoid getting to support. To support teams, to avoid getting customers online with someone with an agent regardless of how that process happens and how how seamless it is as a customer, you do not want to get there as a customer, you just want to have the perfect experience, find the product, the right product, buy it, you're happy with it, and that's it. The costs in general, are quite high. And on average, what we've, learned from different other sources, is that more than fifty percent of all users across all generations, so I'm not only talking about the gen zed generations, and, the buyers that tend to be much more mobile friendly, much more used to very fast interactions. Fifty percent of all users, more than fifty percent of all users actually prefer self-service buying experiences rather than interacting with a salesperson over the chat salesperson as a salesperson, particularly in b to b, or via phone or email. And in b to b, that percentage goes even higher sixty six percent of b to b buyers prefer remote human interactions or digital self-service, which obviously makes search a core and prime component of most self-service offerings. They it cuts out a good search. We'll cut out the friction in the buying process will increase the satisfaction, will drive down costs as a result, and it will just improve the overall end to end efficiency of that process in return. So it's it's quite a big piece that many companies are aware of and they're trying to match it from end to end, but it's not one to be treated lightly. And thank you. So no data, no problem. Over to you, Lisa Doll. Yeah. And I think this is this is a reality across across B to B, more so than it is across B to C, but very often we're faced with client teams that either don't have the data or don't have access to the data or, the lift required to be able to extract the data is just too much so that it would slow down the the overall process. So all that to say that our models are built in a way that we have flexibility to like I mentioned before, to accommodate those data gaps and really what it takes to be able to run, a a very basic BVA again, like, I I don't wanna take away from the fact that there is value in in in getting all of the data, but this is to say, you know, we can work with what we can get. We have, enough BBA is done in B2B across different industries to have pretty solid solid benchmarks that we can use. But in reality, all it takes really to run the BBA are a few data points and, you know, if if we can get top line or e com revenue, if we can get an idea of the volume of sessions, or if we can get the volume orders, and we have an idea of conversion, we can triangulate and get and get the volume of sessions. AOB, we can also derive by using ecomm revenue and the volume of order there's ways to work with the data that we get to be able to to compliment it. Obviously, the more the more of an understanding we can get of of your of your customer behavior and, you know, the the more robust the behavior, but as a starting point, we can definitely run it very few, data points, and I think we'll show it also in in the ROI calculator. There's there's a lot of there's a lot that can be done with very little. Quinney, I think this is a good segue to get into the ROI calculator. I am just going to share. Perfect. Okay. Awesome. And so, you know, when you see what what you're seeing here, there's four different ROI ROI calculators that have been developed by the team. We can jump into the b to b one. Although, you know, there there's definitely value in exploring all of them. Here, it's pretty intuitive and user friendly, but essentially If you're able to, you're able to to toggle and or you can also enter the value on the right, but you can toggle what your number of sessions are, which your online revenue is, your conversion rates, there there's very few basic data points. The number of students catalog, why it's interesting is that Coveo actually thrives in environments of complexity. So the more complex your catalog, the bigger the leap you can, you can achieve with Coveo. So this helps us kind of understand. It it has a bit of to fire effect on the uplift. And then the number of b to b e commerce accounts also helps with, with that. So something also that I didn't mention before. In terms of the value drivers that I presented, those are the ones that are more the the more common, the most impactful, but kind of the the bulk of the BBAs that we see typically in B2B. However, there are other value drivers that, we're we're exploring with different clients. So if you're looking at member of active b to b e commerce accounts, one thing to keep in mind is through this improved experience, you might actually be able to reduce churn. So that metric can actually evolve over time through a Coveo deployment. So just to keep in mind, it's really worth exploring the value proposition of of Coveo with myself or someone on the team to be able to really understand, you know, where can you anticipate value, and it might not be as, you might actually be surprised along the way, but essentially going back to the calculator, you can toggle between all of the the different values. If there's a value that you're not sure of, you can test around a few different figures. But essentially what it does is once you select the values across and you can scroll down on the page. Once you select the values, you press next and then you'll have the chance to get a report, shared with you. Through there, you'll also have the chance to book, to to book a a meeting with someone in the team to be able to explore and kind of get, so you see you have your value already on the left. And your profit uplift. So you you can walk away with a pretty good idea directly of what Coveo can drive for your organization. And then if you to be able to get into a bit more detail and have something that you can then take and go internally to your stakeholders to start the the discussion internally. You can do that as well. And so, Courtney, I think on the next slide we had, I believe we had the resources. Yes. Let me just Perfect. Team, and I can share some final closing stuff. So Perfect. Thank you both for that great informative discussion. It was really engaging while the slides are just loading right now. We will, I can share some final thoughts. If anyone from the audience has any questions, feel free to use the chat function now. I will read them aloud to our speakers. But in the meantime, we can take a look at some of these what we'd like to give you to take away from this session. So first off, I'd really like to thank our speakers for both speaking today, Lisa Doll and Lisa Greyston. As I mentioned, this very informative and engaging discussion. So I wanna thank you both for your time today. And for our audience, I wanted to let you know that not only will we be sharing out a copy of the recording from this session, also, we wanna email out some of these links to you. That ROI calculator that Lisa went through calculating the value of your b to b search. This is a blog that Lisa had worked very hard on with our team, and it literally, drove the content for this, discussion. So it'd be a very helpful resource to also read it considering building your business case for search. And the biggest thing is if you wanna book a meeting with our team, please do so. There is a QR code that is on your screen. So you can just scan that with your phone or alternatively when we do email out the recording, you can also follow-up and book a meeting there. So I'll turn it over to both our speakers to see if there's any other final closing remarks that you might have. But other than that, I just want to thank you both again for your time. Thank you very much, Courtney, for organizing this, and thank you to the audience for logging in. Thank you all. Have a wonderful day. Thank you. I