Diane Burley, head, content and communications, Coveo, discusses how to integrate relevance into every customer touchpoint. She draws from keynotes by Brian Solis, Salesforce Global Innovation Evangelist, and Ray Wang, founder, Constellation Research, at the virtual event, Relevance 360. The message is clear: companies need to stay relevant to survive.
Providing a good customer experience hinges on one thing: relevance. In fact, Coveo’s recent Relevance ReportOpens a new window uncovered that 43% of consumers said they would pay more if they could find what they are looking for in just a few clicks. Let that sink in. Just a few clicks could stand between you and higher profit margins.
Connecting consumers to products and information they want faster is just the tip of the relevance iceberg. Coveo dove into the topic during its recent Relevance 360 virtual eventOpens a new window . Brian Solis, Salesforce Global Innovation Evangelist, and Ray Wang, founder, Constellation Research, spoke about how relevance has the power to make or break companies today.
Since 2000, 63% of the Fortune 500 have merged, acquired, or gone bankrupt. They lost relevance as customers traded loyalty for convenience, price, status, value, purpose, and more.
If businesses cannot keep up with customers’ ever-changing habits, expectations, and preferences, they will not survive. Instead, they need relevance. Here is what you need to know about it.
Learn More: 4 Flaws of Traditional Customer Success Thinking: Why Customer Success Should Be a Companywide Goal
 How You Can Use Data and AI To Create Relevance
We need three components to develop relevance, according to Wang: an analytics mindset, automation, and artificial intelligence/machine learning.
The first step to building relevance is determining what metrics to look at, said Wang. It is not about how many views you have on a product but your ability to convert them. The right business questions can leverage relevance for stronger customer experiences.
Without automation, we could not possibly create relevant experiences quickly enough or at a high enough scale. It is the difference between “gisting†to personas versus sending the right product suggestions, articles, or referrals to millions of individuals. (Of course, to figure out the correct items to share, A/B testing is critical.)
Finally, we need artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve decision velocity. According to Wang, with decision velocity, you can make rapid decisions to create better, more relevant customer experiences, such as what content to serve and to whom. AI and machine learning will help you hone in on creating relevance that can lead to new conversions.
Why You Need to Care About the Person, Not the Persona
Marketing professionals fresh out of college know all about personas: how to sell to them, how to identify them, and the importance of having them. However, they are already three steps behind industry best practices. As I mentioned above, the recommendations we send personas are mere gists. They would be the likely recommendation — in most situations.
But today, marketing needs to be about the person, not the persona, according to Solis. Customer loyalty is up for grabs, and relevance is more important than ever. Getting it wrong means customers walk away, and getting it right can pay huge dividends. Consider the billions in digital native buying power tied to relevance — 39% of Gen Z would be willing to pay moreOpens a new window if they receive recommendations tailored to their individual needs compared to 20% across other generations.
To create relevant experiences, you need to organize data and AI around individuals. Because of the vast amount of computing power available and the democratization of AI, every company can create relevance. This enabled the shift from persona to person. Relevance is a key opportunity to drive more revenue and build better relationships with customers, wherever they are in the ecommerce lifecycle.
What Relevance Looks Like for a $2.8B Footwear Company — and for You?
Relevance for each company might look different, but it all means the same thing: giving your customers what they want, when they want it, maybe even before they know they want it. Over a quarter of consumersOpens a new window will pay more for discovering something they did not know they needed.
Caleres saw this first hand. While Caleres is not a household name, its brands are. Famous Footwear, Dr. Scholl’s, Lifestyle, and more, make up the $2.8 billion portfolio footwear company.
During Relevance 360, Jessica Frame, ecommerce manager, Caleres, and Craig Fels, functional analyst lead, Caleres, dove into what relevance means for the company and its customers.
For Caleres, relevance is about connecting the right person with the right shoe. To do this, it re-platformed its websites to feature-rich sites, where customers could customize the shoe search by store inventory, shipping options, color, size, and more. It ranked content based on what customers wanted to see and what they did not want. It used machine learning to autofill customers’ search queries based on what they showed previous interest in.
By building these more personalized, relevant touchpoints, Caleres saw a 20-25% lift in conversion rate from users engaging in their search box and a 23% increase in conversions when using machine learning to rank products.
For your business, consider leveraging machine learning to autofill search queries. Or, instead of shoe size, maybe your customers want to sort by product materials. Instead of product color, maybe your customers need to see what products can be picked up at a store near them.
Learn More: Making the Most of Your Data To Optimize Customer Experience
Whatever your industry, relevance can give your business a boost.
 Today, all businesses are at a crossroads for customer experience: it is about the person, not the persona. It is about relevance. Yet to take advantage of relevance, we need AI. It can identify what customers want at that moment much more quickly than any human could, accelerating decisions and better serving customers. In tandem, the democratization of AI means any business, regardless of size, can leverage what previously only the corporate giants could do.
As an established or budding leader, if you focus on building customer programs centered around relevance, you will survive today’s digital era.