Good day, everyone. My name is Dale Traxler. I head alliances for Coveo for, commerce and websites. We're thrilled that you're joining us today for this session. I'm gonna let the my fellow panelists introduce themselves, and then we'll dive right into it. So, Brandon, why don't you take it from here? Absolutely. Thank you, Dale. Brandon Garcia, founding partner of DSS Partners. You're everything ecommerce. Really excited to be here today, and, thank you. Hi, Dale. My name is Kristen Reitz, and I am with Highline Warren, VP of Barca, and very excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Right. And Brian McGlynn, I'm the general manager of our ecommerce line of business at Coveo. Very exciting growth, very exciting things happening today, and really happy to talk about, this with a partner and a wonderful customer of ours. Well, great. Thanks, everybody. Hopefully, this will be a motivating thirty minute period, and, we're thrilled to talk about a topic that's near and dear to my heart, which is improving b to b experiences for buyers. I I'm a longtime veteran in b two b, and I've been preaching to the choir, I think, for to a lot of people that we need to improve experiences. And search, being as important as it is today, is one of the height, probably one of the most important things in the experience today because buyers wanna come in and get their job done as quickly as possible. There's a lot of distributors and manufacturers out there who are still migrating from catalogs and from, older platforms that that really deliver an inferior experience to what people are used to on Netflix, Amazon, and all the digital properties today. And we're excited to hear what, what Brandon and his team have done with the Highline Warranty, to improve that whole experience. So I'm gonna kick it off, right up with Kristen. Kristen, maybe you could outline a couple things for us. I'll make it a two part question. Tell us what your main business objectives were with your customers, because, obviously, that's probably the first and foremost thing in in your mind. But what also, what are the, objectives of the business? What are you trying to derive from, investing in new digital technologies like AI powered search? Yeah. Great great questions, Dale. Thank you for asking. You you described us to a t. I think we have the most diverse group of customers that we work with in a b to b, business where I've got folks that are completely savvy on using ecommerce and probably using Netflix and Amazon and everything else out there. But then I also have a lot of mom and pop shops who don't have the infrastructure, and they're using our traditional catalogs and and text simile in some some instances. So what we strive to do, our objective is to make sure that we strive to be the best company to buy from, while providing world class products for the best possible driving experience. It sounds like a lot, but, you know, when you think about these mom and pop shops and you think about some of the more professional, installers, it's such a wide range of consumer sets that we deal with. In terms of trying to drive simplicity, moving from a catalog, obviously, to an ecommerce is is a massive transformation, given our group of of of folks. But we're doing our best, and and I have to say since we started working with, adding the Coveo, it has been a tremendous shift, for us. What what are the main things that, you're you wanted to derive as a business? Are you trying to do a a channel shift? Are you trying to drive new new incremental revenue, keep up with their their crowd? What's what are the business motivations here? From a business perspective, I would say it's yes and. It's it's all of those things. We want to ensure that our higher margin products are, you know, at the top of the pick list. We have a lot of vendor, partners that we work with, and we want to feature their items and not having, you know, having an ecommerce site just coming online. Now remember, we've only started this not too long ago, so, we're definitely still in that ramping up phase. So converting, our our base coming from catalog, calling their sales associate or their sales rep or calling in orders, this is a big shift for them to to now know that we have an ecommerce site that is available to quickly find their orders and then quickly be able to to process those. Excellent. Well, we'll go a little deeper into all those things as we get into the, the meeting here. Brandon, maybe I can pick on you a little bit since you were very close to probably during the design phase understanding the the customer journey and all those things. I'm assuming that as you're going from catalog to online, a pretty important thing is being able to type in a a part number or a description and finding exactly what you're looking for quickly as opposed to trying to figure out what kind of navigational structure you may have included in the site. Excuse me. The traditional search solutions, they just don't really do it. You're not able to find what you're looking for. I can just share my screen for a minute. If we take a look at this up here, you can see that this is traditional search. I'm looking for oil filter, and I have three thousand nine hundred and twenty items. As you can see, our type items aren't even oil filter. So from a business perspective, people like Kristen and her team, they're wrestling with trying to figure out how do I do whack a mole to continue to take the products that aren't relevant, and how do I drive those to the bottom and show the products that are relevant. You know? And even from a fastening filtering perspective, you'll see I got viscosity. Viscosity has nothing to do with oil filters, but traditional search engines, they just don't have that capability. When we move over to an AI search solution, which is what we did for EyeLine, now we can see when I look for oil filter, I have six hundred and seventy five items. For Highline, PrimeGuard is their private label number one brand. They don't have to play the whack a mole game anymore. They're able to show their items clearly at the top of the search results. They've got more relevant search results at this point. So for them, their customers are really able to hone in and find what they're looking for. From a compliancy perspective, a lot of companies need to show this safety data sheet. So they need to be able to provide for their products or the products they sell this information. And this SDS sheet, we're able to bring in videos where relevant, SDS sheets, PDFs, products, and a customer can literally put in a SKU ID space SDS, and we're taking them directly to that document. This this went from a five click exercise where a customer had to download it to their to their laptop to a one click by being able to find this quickly. So this was a tremendous improvement for for them from an experience perspective. What about we we mentioned a channel shift. Obviously, when you buy products online, you're you're probably looking for another product that's similar to that. You're you're usually buying, you know, if you're buying an oil filter, you might be buying oil and all those other types of things. Do you have a situation where you're doing recommended products and, substitute products and upsells and cross sells and those types of things, or is that a phase two kind of a thing? Absolutely. Great question. So, again, back to, you know I I mentioned whack a mole game, but, basically, the merchandising having a lot of people manually have to modify and change values. Same thing with where what you're you're, talking about. When we look at cross sell, upsell, Someone has to manually make those relationships, adjust them if appropriate. You get new items they need to manage. Again, with this solution, Cavell is looking at behavior of purchasers, behaviors, in the industry of the region, etcetera. And they're able to recommend products and say, hey. I see that you bought the oil filter. A lot of people like you are buying an oil wrench, for example. Right? A complimentary product. Being able to do that without having to have an army or staff to do that for you is tremendous. The other thing too that I think is really, relevant in me is the ability to recommend products even during the cart experience. So one of the things we did for Highline aftermarket is when they're at the cart, hey. We'd look at what's in that cart and say, I noticed, again, you bought a an oil filter. Maybe you need an oil wrench. Maybe you need some of these other products. And we're able to, again, help bring up that average order value, help bring up that revenue by being able to do those things. Are you doing any levels of, obviously, you have a a probably an authenticated buyer here. Are you doing any personalization that might be the product's most preferred brands for that that particular buyer or the specific pricing or availability by warehouse or anything like that? Yeah. Great question. We are doing personalization like that. Specifically, when someone, when we look at a region, if someone's coming in from West Coast, for example, we can look at the buying behavior of that region they're in and then recommend appropriate products. In addition to that, once you're logged in, a real popular on the b two b side, feature is called quick order. So as they're constantly adding items in quick order, we're also sharing, hey. Based on who you are or where you are, if you're authenticated, definitely who you are, here are some products you might wanna consider. So we're taking advantage of that shopping experience that help the customer understand products that they may need. What we hear from customers a lot of time is we they tell us we didn't even realize that and this would be from our customer's customers. We didn't even realize you guys sold that category. And that's, again, trying to bring awareness to flush out for them that there are opportunities to products that we sell. That's frequently been one of the things I've run into in b two b is one of the goals is just to create awareness that you carry other types of products. I noticed I I we probably wanted to be speaking more to this, screen that shot that you have up here. I I'm guessing that this has something to do with, large numbers of returns because, in in your search because you have attributes that it's doing keyword stuff on, and it's not really getting to the right stuff. You're absolutely right. And if we had time, I wanted to share that because you hit the nail on the head. How many times the traditional search solution, solar, Elasticsearch, etcetera, there's a lot of them out there. They're looking at eighteen. They're looking at wiper blade. They're looking at, you know, the different words there. You know, people are used to Amazon. They wanna type type in a sentence and know that it can interpret it or in Google and find what they're looking for. In this case, we're bringing back again a a facet that makes no sense. Viscosity, we got one thousand seven hundred four items. With Caveo, it does what's called NLP, natural language processing. And now we can see I'm only looking at a facet related to wiper blades. I know I'm I've got the eighteen highlighted. I have fifty five products coming back versus the previous experience with one thousand seven hundred four. So it's just tremendous tremendous what you can do. Yeah. And and clearly, that's a that's an improvement in the customer experience to get people to what they're looking for, and ancillary products that that may, you know, be complimentary to their purchase. Moving back, Brian, I we'll make sure you're still alive out there. Is this similar to what you're seeing in a lot of first generation, b to b commerce? And maybe you could comment, what what the next phase is for a lot of our customers are as they, mature digitally. Still alive, and, hey, I got my coffee just in case. But, no, it's, some good conversation. Now this is this is absolutely, it's it's impressive. And, certainly, I look at the journey from where, Highline Warren have have started, like, going in, bringing a platform, and going through and really taking that evolution of really the the nuts and bolts of getting data in, but really making the most of it. And this is, it it's it's impressive, and clearly the results, certainly, Kristen have talked a bit about what we're seeing with the organizations. This is really what's what's important we think about making a b to b buying experience go through. We've seen compared to even b to c where fifty, fifty five percent of traffic goes in and hits the search. In b to b, it's it's upwards of ninety. And what it comes down to is if you think about it, when you're trying to go in and digitize your supply chain and digitize your buying process with as an organization, there is a lot more data that has to be processed and worked through. And the important part is being able to get it in an intelligent way to where it doesn't result in a phone call, doesn't result in a frustrated customer bringing in the components around there. So I I love the example that Brandon had brought up and showed around. So not just certainly taking the signals of location, best selling items, or as Chris had mentioned, going through and looking at what there is from a margin and and looking at really promoting, certain brands, but also being able to do that, in a holistic way. So bringing in content from recommendations, bringing in the data sheets, bringing in all those particular items, which are are important. And really the underpinnings underneath that just AI making it happen. So I'd say really, certainly, Highline Warren be I would say is really a leader in what we're seeing at this point and really moving into a leadership position, which is there. And it's very exciting and refreshing, but there are certainly others as well, that need to get there that are making those movements. And and anything certainly around b to b commerce, this is absolutely critical. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Kristen, jumping back to you a little bit. We touched a little bit on the the objectives of the business, and you mentioned things like, displaying higher margin, products up upfront. And I I think you also have some sponsored products that you wanna make sure, position well. So, you know, you're using an AI powered first and foremost, an a AI powered search and recommendation engine, but, you also need the flexibility, obviously, to tune that to some degree. And how important was that as you kind of evaluated, what the the platforms and the user experience? Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. And, the fine tuning has been, amazing. Because if you think about it, Highline, aftermarket and Warren distribution have more recently come together. We have over twenty two thousand different items that we're now displaying. And when you think about I mean, Brandon mentioned it. It's like we have products that some of our partners don't even know were available. So being able to kind of bring those things together has been great. We've had, when you think about that level of integration, there's small teams that have been coming together. So we don't have the manpower that you would expect to be able to manually put all these promos in and to be able to try to bolster these things up on the, you know, digital shelf, so to speak. So the AI has been incredible. My team is scrappy, you know, and and we like it that way. And so having this kind of advanced AI has been, frankly needed so that we can make it, again, very easy for our, our partners to be able to find the products that they have come to know and expect, but then also get nice surprise and delights of, like, oh, wow. Now I can actually find that as well. Yeah. When when I was working in b two b and building sites and had inferior search, on some of the platforms, I was always amazed that, you know, they had type ahead, but the type ahead wasn't really correcting anything that was correct. It was, you know, you'd be typing, you'd forget the dash, and it would get lost. And what you really need is, you know, that that intelligence to say, here's what you probably are looking for without having to type out a whole bunch of misspelled or, you know, types of thing. And on the business side again, now you don't have to be managing synonyms and and things like that. I'm sure that's a a freedom that you're enjoying. Yeah. It is. And you'd be amazed how many people don't know how to spell antifreeze. Is it one word? Is it two words? And before we, implemented Coveo, you would say you know, you would get an output that would say, oops. Sorry. Call our helpline. That's not I mean, that's not realistic. So Better than a four zero four, I guess. There you go. End of the day. I you you you haven't I realize you haven't been online that long with, Coveo, but have you seen some results that are are worth talking about it yet? Yeah. You know, I've been navigating in, looking at some of the results, and they're really encouraging. So some of the things that I'm starting to see is engagement is up. So if I look at when we first went online and some of our customers, I can see that, their baskets are bigger. So I can compare orders from, you know, from from previous orders and see that, okay, I'm getting bigger orders. I'm getting, better engagement, time on-site. It it's been quite nice to kind of see that. And, of course, I'm seeing it in terms of sales popping up. So I think as we bring more convert more of our partners onto the ecommerce site and and evolve this, I think there's gonna be more surprise and delight for them, because, again, the user, the usability of it is just so much easier than going back to a catalog and flipping through the hundreds of pages, that they have been traditionally been doing. And, of course, you know, I have to say it's, of course, a little bit more sustainable. Right? You know, I can easily just go online versus trying to flip through a a catalog that's maybe just Yeah. I'm fascinated by how quickly the acceleration's happening in b two b. I think COVID really pushed some folks to to realize they can't rely on catalogs and face to face visits and, you know, telesales anymore. You know, you've gotta have a way to scale that that, is more automated and more, AI powered all all the way across. Brandon, what what kind of trends are you seeing, if you were to paint out a a phase two here, at Highline Warren based on what you know, what what kinds of things are you gonna go back and suggest to Kristen over the coming months? Well, great question. You know, one of the things that I think we you know, we're just it's like it's kinda like a kid in a candy shop. There's some fantastic reporting and some fantastic things that are happening twenty four seven. That's what's so exciting about this project is that while we sleep, it's still making recommendations. The algorithms are working. They're they're finding getting new findings. It's really digging into reporting. We just scratched the surface and starting to look at all the the great value, the next things, and the next version we can do. So, our recommendation is we really wanna dig in and start finding where some of those other opportunities we're not realizing. There's a very robust reporting available that's much deeper than what you would traditionally get through Google Analytics or some of those analytical tools. So we're gonna be focusing and doing some data mining, understanding where some additional opportunities, where to turn the rent some more. And product recommendations are gonna be really, something that we're gonna be looking at because there's a lot of fantastic models that are available. And, you know, we can have the opportunity to try to test and work with some of those to find the best fit. Right? Because we are at the beginning stage. In addition to that, you know, we've been working with Kristen and her team already. As a matter of fact, earlier this week talking about, you know, service champ dot com. They have another, site that that's up, and it does not have to be implemented, and they're very excited. Now, like, Kristen, I won't put words in your mouth. I'll let you address it, but excited to move this capability over to their other site, which is more of a job or focus site. It's more of those auto mechanic shops, etcetera, versus the shop Highline Warren is more of a larger business enterprise type companies like a Jiffy booth, things like that. I see. So, yeah, that's those those are some of the things that we're we're looking at. That's great. By the way, Kristen, I was gonna mention earlier, I really like that you call your customers partners. I I I Mhmm. In b two b, I really appreciate that. They're your your partners in business, and I I just don't have a good way to Yep. Right. Right. No. I love that. You you hear people have clients and customers, but in your case, as b two b, you have partners. So I think that's great. Brian, kind of the same question for you. You know, Coveo works with a lot of large distributors, and a lot of large, you know, brand manufacturers that are going direct to consumer and also through b two b channels. What what do you see that is the next evolution in, in the experience that's gonna be impacted by AI? I I look at it, and I I think that's the thing. Just to to tee off of, Kristen, talking about your your customers being partners. And and that's really the way we look at, getting to know a customer a lot more in that part. So from the next things we look at, so we're we're working with, with with the eco ecosupplier at this point where we're going through and, working on on not just focusing on on the commerce perspective, but also the customer service perspective. So extending to where we're able to go in and provide that same level of recommendation, that same level of content and relevant experience where if someone has a problem or an issue with the product that we can go through and either provide the means to go through documentation and help or even help the agents in their job in triaging a lot of that using that same AI, but that's so sick same sorts of signals that we see coming in from the various parts. And once again, the way we work with our customers is we we look at a maturity map. We'll say, here's an Barca. And rather than just throwing a whole bunch of tech right up front, a lot of it is customers that we see going through and just a good deal in general to look at focusing at what level of technology and what are the business purposes to achieve from it. So some of the metrics we see in b two b, there is digital penetration, what percentage are online. There's certainly a growth number that's part of it. There's a cost per order. It's a big driver. A lot of times, we're trying to go in and say, okay. We funded this platform. How do we go in and drive that? All those things will go in as as really a key part of it that's there. But I I think that it Dale, to your to your question, it's an Barca, what do I see as next? And certainly, our what our customers are coming in and talking about is that connected experience, that that omnichannel experience of pre purchase, after purchase, making certain that our customer is being taken care of on all those particular parts around there. And that's a part where we look at as well some of our investments in r and d where we're very heavily involved as indexing more sorts of content, making sense of documents, and we call smart snippets and others where we can go in and help answer questions a lot more to really mimic what we take in the analog world to provide that in the digital world so we can assist the people that are helping customers. So sales reps, making certain that reps in the field that are there are really demand generators and working at it this part versus order taking by giving them technology for that. Customer service reps are really providing the the best and up to date components, and then customers are getting it from a full three sixty onboarding to where, if they run into questions and others. We're able to help and resolve that all powered by AI and that connectivity. And that's that's really those pillars of investment is where we're we're putting a lot of our capabilities, and that's really what, our customers are asking for as part of the evolution that we see. I and that's that leads me to a great question, I think, Christian, for you, and you may not even have, you know, thought through through all of this. But do you have plans to leverage, some of that, some of those, signals that that Coveo's gathering on a buyer's intent and behavior and all those kinds of things, into your service. You know, if a customer if they call in the customer service and they need help, knowing what they might have looked at or knowing what types of content they're searching for, is it a service problem versus a sales problem? Have you thought about, you know, in enabling, Coveo on some of the back end systems as well to help smooth that process out? Yeah. I think that we just scratched the surface with Coveo, surface, that is with Coveo. I've just been so impressed by the fact that we literally have launched this. I mean, we're, you know, so new where we've got weeks under our belt, and I'm already starting to see improvements. I'm already starting to see bigger baskets, more revenue coming in and and bigger purchases. So I'm excited to see what else we can do with it. And and the more we can integrate and the more we understand what our, you know, our partners are looking for and the easier I can service them with their needs, then they're gonna continue to reward us and continue to be our, you know, our our go to or will be their go to to help with customer service, and with other items that we can do. So I think we just scratched the service. I'm really excited to see what else we can we can uncover here. Yeah. It looks great that you have, you know, a good partner in DSS and and you've worked together so far. I'm curious, how long did the the re how did how long did it take to implement AI powered search, for Highline Warren Brandon? You know, we've got a great offering where, is we have a a nice strong partnership with Aveda, and we've been working with you guys for a while. So we definitely understand the technology. We have a great offering where for existing customers, we're able to get you up within thirty five days. And we actually have an accelerator score, which is DSS partners in our shop accelerator store, one of one of the platforms we work in. We call it DS, d I e s. And in there, we've already integrated the Kaveo capability. So the reason the way basically, the way we're able to say we can do this in thirty five days is we've already integrated that technology. It's very easy to do. You guys have made it very easy with your open architecture. And so we're able to literally take things and bring them over to Highline. And most of the you call it techy work. You know, that's accomplished within a week and a half or two. It's thirty five days because we have to test it, tune it, make sure it's really critical on time for production. So that's from beginning to end with thirty five days. We we can get somebody up and running. Well, it sounds like that's a a quick win, and in time to business value is pretty fast. That must be really important to you guys, Kristen, as opposed to a replatforming project, which we've all heard the horror stories of over time. Well, we're starting to run out of time. So, you know, Kristen, I I I think I'll go back to you and and let you summarize. Are anything else you wanna share with your fellow, VPs of marketing and digital, that that's a lesson learned or anything? Yeah. I mean, I've been doing, digital ecommerce for many years, and, just the sheer power of being able to see when we started a site that had nothing to now several weeks later, I now have a very organized, very functional site, that just has all the fundamentals that you would expect the fundamental you would expect to have on day one, and we have that. And, and to see these improvements so rapidly has been a great story back to our executive team and feeling great about the investments that we're making, the decisions that we're we're making, and and the business that we're gonna be driving and delivering. So it's been great. And as as Brandon mentioned, we are going to extend it into our service champ, ecommerce site as well, and I expect, to see similar results. So very positive experience from our end. Well, that's awesome. And, I think, I think I'm gonna call it here so we have some time left for questions. And, upfront, I wanna thank, Brandon, Brian, Kristen for joining us today, and, hopefully, we'll have some good questions we can field from, from the crowd.