Enrich customers’ search experience
Over the years, consumers have grown to expect more out of search. With Google setting the bar high in the external search space, what are large retailers like The North Face doing to enrich their on site customers searching experience? IBM OmniFind Discovery Edition (ODE) is the answer. ODE is a search engine that offers unparalleled features that help enrich customers’ online searching experiences. In contrast with the rigid traditional search methods, customer can now search in WebSphere Commerce with Google like functionality.
Key features and benefits with IBM ODE
- Natural language processing: a feature that allows for real time interpretation of user intent that does not require the traditional search methods.
- Respelling and voice over: a feature that can deliver the result regardless of grammatical or spelling error.
- Direct Navigation: a feature that can direct the user to the actual landing page. For example, if “customer service” was typed in the search field, the system will redirect the user to the customer service landing page.
- Faceted Navigation: a new standard of presentation that can guide the customer during their browsing or searching experience.
- Management Console: a tool for business user to extend the vocabulary of the system and to fine tune the search result. It also provides the abilities for business user to configure the business rules, testing and to view the search reports.
- Predefined Industrial Ontology packages: ODE comes with a set of predefined industry vocabulary, configuration logic to speed up the implementation time.
How can we help to enrich your customers’ online searching experience?
Zobrist Consulting Group offers broad experience in implementing IBM OmniFind Discovery Edition for small and large online retailers. For our smaller clients, we provide a turnkey / plug-and-play solution. For our larger clients, we provide a tailor solution that fits their specific needs. Beyond enriching your customers online searching experience, ODE will helps to increase your overall conversion rates, revenue, and average order value (AOV).
How does ODE fare in pricing compared to other search engines such as Endeca, Mercado ..etc?
ODE is not the most expensive search engine but it’s not the cheapest as there are open source search engine such as Lucene. But ODE is an IBM product so support is great. Furthermore, it works so we like it a lot. Once you become familiar with the product, then implementation is very straightforward. An implementation can take anywhere from 4 weeks to 12 weeks depending on the level of complexity of the product attributes.
Endeca is definitely more expensive than ODE and Mercado is out of business about 8 months ago. Any implementation should be done by an experienced developer who has been properly trained otherwise it’s a recipe for disaster to implement something that works half of the time. This will frustrate your shoppers and may drive them away from you site.
