Letting go of manual rules-based merchandising delivers more relevant search results, improves customer experience and boosts conversions by more than 10%.
As one of the leading re-sellers of IT-products in the Nordics, Dustin was early in building web presence and moving their product catalogue online. The company continued to develop web functionality to drive online sales but was still facing challenges with relevance in search results and category listings.
Restrained search
Dustin has been a satisfied Voyado customer for a number of years. Since they wanted a high degree of control over the relevance in list rankings, they developed rules to put extra emphasis on stock levels, product images and campaigns.
After some time, we started to notice that we couldn’t provide our customers with the products they were searching for. For example, newly launched products were not being exposed since they hadn’t been stocked yet, says Jens Malmqvist, Store Optimisation Manager at Dustin.
Jens took his concerns to Voyado, and a technical review of the implementation was suggested. It became apparent that the system was capable of much more than it was being used for.
Letting go of manual rules
As a result of the technical review, Jens decided to do an A/B test. Using their own developed test tool, they let half the traffic see the website with Dustin’s rules, and the other half see the version with full AI-driven relevance from Voyado.
It soon became apparent that the irregular search results were due to us setting up our own rules and overriding the system’s logic, Jens explains.
The test convinced Dustin to let Voyado's solution work freely to improve the search results, and the numbers were very reassuring.
The impact of AI-driven relevance
When we let the system do its job, we saw an increase in conversions of over 10 percent, Jens reveals. This is an enormous increase for a B2B site.
With the system responding to individual behaviour and intention in real time, Dustin now provides customers with what they’re looking for. This has made the company more customer focused, and the numbers show that the customer experience has improved considerably. And the work continues.
"Voyado's solution is very integrated into our website. We’re constantly evaluating our work and share insights with other departments, for example when we’re boosting our own product line. Next step will be to review category pages and filtering. Jens says. We started out by guessing what is important for our customers, which clearly didn’t work. In the end, Voyado's solution proved that you simply can’t beat the speed and relevance delivered through the use of AI technology" he concludes.
