The challenge
Upon joining EDEKA, Bringmeister took the opportunity to evaluate their customer experience in order to isolate and eliminate top customer pain points. They learned that the search experience was causing ongoing frustrations for customers searching for specific products. Customers searching for specific products needed to type out the exact product names in order to find them, otherwise they might not find any results. The team needed to provide a smarter search experience to their customers, one that was flexible enough to lead customers to the products they’re searching for, regardless of how precise the search query.
At the time Bringmeister was using Solr and they were having difficulties addressing their search performance issues easily on the platform. Making changes to search on Solr required too many developer resources, which resulted in slow and difficult iterations, giving little power to the business stakeholders who were relying on the work. Bringmeister’s business teams needed to be able to make changes to the search experience quickly, and in a way that was less cumbersome to the company.
The solution
Josephine and Nicholas explored several options for building their new search experience, one that would deliver relevant product results to customers very quickly. They considered external vendors and even considering re-building the in-house product on Solr.
In the end, Algolia stood out to Bringmeister for several reasons. First and foremost, Algolia’s transparent and comprehensive product documentation was easy to follow and would allow Bringmeister to implement quickly. Furthermore, with Algolia, Bringmeister would no longer need developer resources to make changes to their search ranking. It was clear to Josephine and Nicholas that Algolia represented a flexible and high capacity tool that would empower them to accomplish much more with their search product than they had ever considered, at a lower resource cost.
The result
As soon as Bringmeister was up and running with Algolia, the customer complaints ended. Gone were the days when customers couldn’t find the products they were looking for. What’s more, the business teams gained full knowledge and control of Algolia’s relevance logic. Bringmeister sees this as a strategic advantage: the business teams can execute against their own search ideas immediately, rather than having to submit and wait on support tickets and risking they falling through.
The team realized that Algolia’s easy-to-use features could be applied to power e-commerce strategies like marketing and partnership campaigns. Bringmeister uses query rules systematically to boost products to align with seasonal campaigns and partnership programs. Algolia gives them the flexibility and power to use search as a driver of campaign results. For example, if you search for asparagus in the springtime, you might see suggestions for other products that are often cooked with asparagus. The Bringmeister team recognizes Algolia as a key driver of their ability to surface new, lesser known products to their customers. In this way, they see Algolia as much more than a powerful search engine, it’s a discovery engine.
Query rules also help Bringmeister elevate their brand. With the ability to boost fresh and organic produce, they offer their customers a premium grocery experience. Nicholas likens the Bringmeister search experience to the merchandising of an actual grocery store: it’s as if they’re able to place their premium products at eye level, moving store-brand goods to the bottom shelf.
Their partnership with Algolia enables the Bringmeister team across many fronts, from search and discovery innovation, to development efficiencies, to brand elevation tactics, and new marketing strategies. Since implementing Algolia, Bringmeister has seen a 63% decrease in exit rate.
