The new age of customer experience: Smart site search and agile data integration

The rapid pace of change of online commerce is almost enough to give you whiplash if you’re not properly prepared. With new apps, solutions and services almost constantly being launched, businesses are challenged with assembling just the right mix for their business to encourage growth. Management teams and decision makers are not only tasked with managing day-to-day processes, but also with the strategic assembly of the support system that keeps everything running.

But as much as ecommerce continues to evolve, there’s one core element that has stayed absolutely central: customer experience. In fact, you could even go so far to say that the drive to perfect the online customer experience — to bring the customer closer to your brand, and to reduce barriers to not only becoming a one-time customer, but a life-long brand advocate — is one central driving force pushing ecommerce forward.

And there’s one simple thing every ecommerce business can do to quickly improve their online customer experience: have a agile, smart, reliable site search, and then integrate that data fully within the business for maximum impact and intelligence.

The importance of site search in Ecommerce

The most basic site searches are passive and superficial. As an ecommerce retailer, using a basic site search plugin is a missed opportunity: people who use site searches are far more likely to purchase to the tune of up to a 50% improvement in conversion rates. Site searches are social signals that savvy brands should (and can) capitalize on via services that provide deeper functionality, increased control, and ultimately trying to serve up exactly what the customer is looking for in site search.

On the other side of the same coin, those consumers who land on your ecommerce site and use search who aren’t able to find what they’re looking for in the first few passes are far more likely to leave your site and not convert at all. Site search presents a serious competitive advantage, too: only 15% of companies have dedicated resources to optimizing the ecommerce site search experience, while 42% completely ignore it according to Econsultancy.

Do more with smart site search

Mastering site search is now simpler than ever thanks to agile and highly-sophisticated ecommerce partners like Klevu. With 30% or more of ecommerce website visitors using site search tools to find products, coupled with the variety of ways users search for products (product names, descriptions, product numbers, and many, many more), it just makes sense to leave complex site search to those who excel in it.

Put simply, site search is your business’ opportunity to intercept user behaviour and augment the user experience. Hitting all the marks, Klevu provides outstanding functionality in this regard. Not only is their site search best-in-class in terms of standard functionality like speed, autocomplete and customization, Klevu clearly deeply understands the connection between site search and providing an amazing customer experience. With incredible features like self-learning search, error tolerance, and the ability to understand what shoppers mean even when what they type out might make very little sense, Klevu makes sure your customers find exactly what they’re looking for quickly and with incredible ease.

Tying it all together

But as any experienced ecommerce business already knows, installing an application or plugin (even one as great as Klevu) is just the start of strategically building the new tool into your existing technology infrastructure. Even the best applications in the world still need to be integrated into your other applications to allow data to flow automatically and in near-real time, and this integration needs to be done in such a way that it doesn’t impede your business’ growth.

This is where sophisticated data integration specialists like VL and our VL OMNI Dashboard come in. A business surrounded by similarly robust and agile partners like Klevu and VL have advantages that others approaching the same problems ad-hoc and without strategy in hand simply do not. With Klevu taking care of your site search, VL OMNI would bring the service into the wider fold of your applications in a way that keeps your business scalable and agile to change. We do this by arranging how the applications are connected so that business can easily make changes to connections, applications, and more with speed and ease — and without having to do costly rebuilds. You can learn more about how we helped a customer go from being impeded by their data integration strategy and supplier, to being able to acquire brands, make quick strategic adjustments, and much more in this video and this presentation.

Pairing sophisticated site search with agile data integration just makes sense for many reasons. Imagine deeper insight, more accurate data, and a the ability to understand exactly who your customers are from a suite of angles. With the constant and ever-important theme of customer experience as the driving force behind ecommerce evolution, high-quality data integration helps deliver on that great customer experience from your website all the way down to delivery. Visit our website or learn more on our blog and by becoming a subscriber.

In the end, surrounding yourself with great partners like Klevu and VL OMNI just makes sense in creating and maintaining that great customer experience that keeps people coming back time and time again.

About VL OMNI

Accelerate growth with VL OMNI. VL provides agile and scalable SaaS data integration to scaling upper SMB and enterprise-level omnichannel business across a number of sectors, including omnichannel retail. Over 200 businesses trust VL OMNI, an agile point to multi-channel integration middleware platform, to move data seamlessly through their infrastructure as they grow, expand and accelerate their business. Accelerate growth with VL OMNI: Your trusted integration platform for real-time accurate customer order data, shipment details, inventory, and prices. Learn more about VL OMNI at www.vlomni.com, or start a conversation today by clicking here.