In an era where customer experience reigns supreme, achieving digital excellence is a worthy goal for retail leaders. But what exactly does digital excellence mean? And how do businesses achieve it? We took a seat at the virtual roundtable during the GDS Retail Digital Summit earlier this summer to discuss one approach to excellence in ecommerce: unlocking the power of content.

Powering the customer experience with relevant content

Piyush Patel, Algolia’s Chief Strategic Business Development Officer, served as one of the roundtable moderators, leading the discussion on “Achieving digital excellence – the power of content.” The crux of the conversation revolved around addressing the modern consumer’s craving – or rather, expectation – for timely, tailored content. The challenge, however, lies in providing flexibility to marketers, merchandisers, and developers alike to deliver such experiences seamlessly. A fast, scalable cloud-native platform that balances the needs of all back-end teams involved holds the key to maintaining a continuous flow of engaging content that converts customers and keeps them coming back for more.

Diverse voices, common challenges

The two-day roundtable engaged a range of industry leaders, representing retail sectors such as clothing, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and more. Their diverse perspectives added depth and variety to the conversation, though it was clear that the hurdles to achieving digital excellence cut across the range of retailers represented and that a unified solution is essential.

Throughout the discussion, six core challenges emerged as common hurdles faced by the participants:

1. Content Relevance: Ensuring the right content reaches the right audience
2. Data Value: Linking product content with all other elements that make the data valuable
3. Personalization Predicament: Tailoring large amounts of data to very specific audiences
4. Multichannel Presentation: Presenting data effectively across websites and mobile apps
5. Tech Stack Improvements: Selecting the best composable solution for each element of your ecommerce site, from search to content management to checkout
6. Content Creation: Using existing data to create content that enhances the customer experience

The need for real-time APIs to address these challenges was a recurring theme, showcasing the importance of speed and scale when faced with large volumes of products and data.

Algolia’s insights: balancing front-end experiences with back-end management

While the content conundrum is an important hurdle for businesses to tackle, ultimately shoppers aren’t concerned with the technicalities of how content is managed on the back-end of a website or app. But if the front-end experience isn’t up to par, shoppers are sure to notice. To that end, Piyush advocated that while back-end content management should remain a priority, organizations can’t afford to neglect front-end enhancements, especially ones that are proven to significantly impact customers’ digital experiences — and business’ bottom lines. On such enhancement: AI-powered search.

Search and the retail revolution

During a time when ecommerce technology evolves quickly, retailers have to keep up. Especially when falling behind can lead to lost revenue. So as businesses tackle the challenges around content on the back-end, what can be done on the front-end to satisfy shoppers?

One of the quickest ways — in both time-to-market and return on investment — to make a big impact is with the search bar. With fast, smart search that understands not only the keywords of a search query, but also the shopper’s intent, retailer’s can boost conversion rates, eliminate null results, lower cart abandonment rates, and drive higher revenue overall.

Achieve digital excellence with Algolia NeuralSearch

Never before has vector search, capable of understanding user intent, been available at speed and scale. Now, by using neural hashes to compress each query, Algolia NeuralSearch combines our award-winning full-text keyword search engine with vector understanding into a single API, applying AI across query understanding, retrieval, and ranking to deliver the best result instantly, each time.

Consider these results from NeuralSearch customers:

• 65% decrease in zero search results (Frasers Group)
• 17% increase in conversion rates (Frasers Group)
• 9% increase in clickthrough and conversion rates (Everlane)

Contact us today to learn how AI-powered search can help your business achieve digital excellence.