Industry Vertical: Retail and Consumer

Challenge

Today's consumers are using the latest technology,transforming the retail experience as they shop whenever and wherever. With instant access to product details, peer feedback from social media, price comparison sites, and competitive options, the balance has shifted to the buyer.

Likewise, retailers are investing in technology to create integrated and intelligent shopping experiences across the web, storefront, or mobile phone. Faced with multiple challenges, including managing a vast amount of products, keeping up with the frequency in which they change, and getting the right products in front of the right buyers, retailers require advanced technology to accelerate business growth and differentiate themselves from the proliferation of competitive retailers.

Forrester Research shows that customer experience has a high correlation to business results: good customer experience drives purchases and improves retention. Within a bustling and constantly evolving marketplace filled with rapidly changing consumer preferences, retailers need to be able to exploit the abundance of information at their fingertips, quickly take advantage of newly emerging trends, and deliver a memorable shopping experience across offline and online channels. Customer experiences — whether they are in-store, on an eCommerce site, or through the customer service center—need to be integrated and optimized to maximize business results. At the same time, simplifying, automating, and optimizing internal business processes has become just as critically important as driving customer purchases.

Autonomy provides market-leading solutions for retailers for increasing conversions, share of wallet, and customer loyalty and satisfaction. Autonomy's advanced technology discovers patterns in buyer behavior, simplifies the merchandising and marketing of growing product inventory, seamlessly integrates with existing transaction processes, and delivers tailor-made online experiences for consumers.

• "Since implementing Autonomy Interwoven, sales have gone up in some of our divisions by as much as five to tenfold. This is due largely to our ability to instantly update our online offers." - Francesco Bruno, Manger of Content Management Infrastructure, Tesco
• "Autonomy Interwoven is addressing the needs of marketers with capabilities in website optimization, targeting and segmentation, and dynamic delivery of targeted, highly personalized content." - Gartner Web Content Management Magic Quadrant, August 2009
• "Autonomy Interwoven has enabled us to strengthen our brand, speed our web publishing processes, and deliver a more compelling, personalized experience to our customers. As a result, we're already achieving significant revenue growth and a strong competitive position as a leading player in European eCommerce." - Michael Lindemann, Head of eCommerce, Karstadt Quelle Financial Services

Solution Description

Delivering Multichannel Customer Experiences

Multichannel Interaction, Analysis and Optimization

Autonomy's Multichannel Interaction Analysis uses advanced speech recognition functionalities to automatically process and analyze all customer interactions made via phone, chat or email. Using Autonomy IDOL, Multichannel Interaction Analysis delivers a multi-faceted view of customer behaviors, needs, expectations and intentions. For example, Food and Beverage customers such as Nestlé and Britvic use Autonomy's multichannel solutions to stay up-to-date with the latest product developments and opportunities in the market so that they can bring exciting new products to consumers.

Autonomy's Multichannel Optimization is unique in understanding customer interactions across all channels, including social media, web, in-store and contact center. Autonomy is the only solution provider that offers a multichannel solution that can link the call center and the web with a customizable view of advanced analytics, while allowing retailers to react to potentially damaging conversations and take advantage of potential emerging trends.

Web Content Management

Autonomy Interwoven's market leading Web Content Management (WCM) solution provide comprehensive support for the entire online customer lifecycle, from creating dynamic websites to authoring product descriptions and promotions, managing images and training videos, to dynamically displaying it directly to site visitors. Autonomy Interwoven offers everything a marketer needs to manage an eCommerce site, including content creation and management, out-of-the-box site application, multivariable testing, recommendations, targeting, and web analytics integrations. Integrated rich media management capabilities also provide for reuse, transformation, and the optimization of product images, offers, promotions, video demonstrations and ads, and other digital assets

Autonomy Interwoven WCM is a scalable solution that applies pattern recognition and next-generation classification technologies to manage the complex relationships between disparate products, marketing copy, rich media, social media, and customer interactions, and automatically facilitates synchronized and dynamic updates across multiple sites and pages. Within a matter of minutes, marketers can easily build, update, and optimize landing pages and microsites for email campaigns and product launches, merchandise and target offers to high value segments, and manage the entire online experience without ongoing technical assistance.

Rich Media Management

Autonomy Virage's Rich Media solutions can efficiently manage vast amounts of diverse digital assets leveraged across online and offline media. The Autonomy Interwoven Rich Media Management solution provides a central library that houses the latest master version of every digital asset, automates tagging and search, and makes it easy for retailers to leverage variations. Autonomy Interwoven's solution speeds and simplifies the production of variations for different media, different software programs, and special purposes. And it pinpoints the exact digital asset—such as product images, video demonstrations, Flash, or audio—needed with meaning-based technology applied to every asset within the system. The solution provides a broad range of applications meeting the needs for pre-production and finished goods, including printed brochures, product packaging, catalogs, and cross-media advertisements for print, web, and mobile phones.

Social Media Analysis

Autonomy Interwoven's Social Media Analysis discovers and monitors the exploding amount of user generated content on the web, providing organizations with deep insights into, and engagement with, customers and markets. Connectors into social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube combined with automated sentiment analysis of blogs, reviews, and other conversations provide the ability to understand an audience's tone and feelings about product launches and marketing campaigns. Proactive responses to negative reactions can be delivered to quickly avoid brand damage. Deep analysis of social media dialogue also highlights important consumer trends in real time. Online retailers can also leverage out-of-the-box social media applications such as polls, forums, and ratings to elicit customer feedback on products as well as connect visitors with relevant product reviews and other like-minded shoppers.

Contact Center Management

Autonomy eTalk delivers a full suite of contact center tools that work together in a seamless flow to improve efficiency and enhance the quality of service being delivered. It enables users to manage all contact center data through a centralized system as well as monitor a wide range of metrics, such as customer satisfaction levels, handle times, and effective scheduling—all from a single interface. Autonomy eTalk's Contact Center solutions optimize people, processes, and technology to ensure customer satisfaction, while reducing costs throughout the contact center. Workforce optimization enables contact center supervisors to measure, improve, and track performance of contact center agents. With a full range of components, including quality monitoring, agent performance evaluations, workforce management, training, surveys, and interaction analysis technology, Autonomy provides the industry's most comprehensive suite for contact center management and optimization.

Mobile Commerce

Autonomy Interwoven enables marketers to create a unique eCommerce experience for even mobile shoppers. Marketers have the ability to recognize what products the customers have viewed and on what platform (i.e. iPhone, Blackberry, or PDA) as well as create, optimize, and deliver content for mobile devices. Web content can be optimized to ensure that users can easily read web content through their mobile device and that the content and layout are optimized and targeted for the specific scenarios of mobile users. For instance, marketers of a global retail conglomerate recognize that a large percentage of mobile users access their site to find the closest retail store. With this information they can ensure that the store locator option is one of the first items mobile users see when they access their website.

Improving eCommerce Results

Advanced Search Marketing

With Advanced Search Marketing, marketers are able to support both external and on-site search marketing requirements, from SEO to intelligent site search to delivering targeted offers based on behavior. Autonomy Interwoven enables marketers to improve organic search rankings through automating SEO processes and best practices, ensuring that web content is fresh and up-to-date, as well as automatically classifying content in an intuitive and organized manner.

Autonomy also significantly enhances the onsite search experience with conceptual matching and advanced pattern recognition. The solution takes into account the context of the search, all available content as well as structured and unstructured information, and all customer interactions—including past queries, downloads, transactions, and click activity—to deliver the best matching results. Integrated merchandising and content targeting also enables marketers to serve offers and promotions based on keywords searched onsite and off as well as automatically deliver recommendations or conceptually related content.

Directed Navigation

Click-count, or the time spent between a customer hitting the front-page and order processing, has become a parameter of comparison for eCommerce sites. Websites, which are slow or difficult to navigate, risk losing out on scores of potential customers to the competition. For any retailers with large online throughputs, the ability to tackle the great diversity of customers and their needs by creating personalized user experiences is a key competitive differentiator.

Directed Navigation radically simplifies the online experience for new customers and channel partners. Real-time profiles are generated as visitors interact both online and with other channels. This allows retailers to understand the intentions and needs of each visitor to quickly and efficiently guide them to the right products, services, or information. For example, a large hardware wholesaler and distributor offers a broad and complex matrix of products from multiple manufacturers on their website. Given this breadth of product categories, high number of stock-keeping units (SKUs), and complexity of product configurations, visitors can quickly become confused and frustrated, leading to high bounce rates, wasted marketing investments, and lost revenue. Directed Navigation is used to build visitor profiles based on historical and real-time information. It then quickly guides visitors to their desired content by displaying or removing filter options, navigation, and hyperlinks based on the context and best-matching content. Products or links to information can be directly delivered to the browser, or handed to other applications for delivery, such as rich internet applications (RIAs), portals, or web applications.

Merchandising & Recommendation

Autonomy Interwoven's Merchandising & Recommendation reads, understands, and categorizes products by concept, including relationships between products, behavior, and customer segments. Based on the patterns of items that are purchased together by buyers, Merchandising & Recommendation can determine relationships between seemingly unrelated products to recommend or link products together.

The solution also helps companies with large and complex catalogues that must be managed, updated, tagged, and organized regularly. Merchandising & Recommendation automatically updates product categories and recommendations when new products are added or deleted. Using scalable technology that can easily handle billions of products items and personalized recommendations, millions of consumers, and unlimited interactions, the offering generates personalized, intelligent recommendations to each visitor based on their unique activity. Recommendations can be served dynamically to up-sell and cross-sell products as well as positively influence the purchasing process. For example, keyword as well as concept-triggered promotions can be delivered to promote overstocked products, recommend complementary items, or suggest alternatives to out-of-stock merchandise.

Implementing Marketing Optimization

Advanced Analytics

Autonomy's advanced statistical analysis and pattern recognition capabilities can determine customer perception and behavior, website and campaign effectiveness, product and brand sentiment, and competitive standing. Marketers are given unprecedented visibility into dynamically changing trends, preferences, and buying patterns. Autonomy's automatic clustering draws a real-time map of online transactions and reveals the most sought-after products, the least desired items, and the products that are slowly gaining popularity to help drive online marketing and merchandising strategies.

Multivariable Testing

Multivariable Testing and online experimentation plays a key role in understanding which content and messages customers respond to best. Using optimal design algorithms, Autonomy Optimost's Multivariable Testing eliminates the key limitations of traditional A | B testing, and instead allows marketers to simultaneously test virtually unlimited combinations of content, including images, copy, layout, headlines, and forms.

Retailers can leverage multivariable testing to determine the most effective marketing, including messaging for new products, optimal pricing for maximum revenue, and promotional offers to increase conversions. Autonomy Optimost provides the ability to test all types of content, including text, pictures, video, page layout, email, banners, Flash, and AJAX. Multivariable testing with Autonomy Optimost can also optimize across product pages, shopping carts, and conversion funnels to reduce abandonment rates and ensure click-to-order. Clients typically benefit from double-digit increases to the conversion rates using Autonomy Optimost, often adding up to millions of additional dollars to the bottom line.

Segmentation & Targeting

Segmentation & Targeting automatically identifies new customer segments as they emerge. The offering combines testing and targeting to determine certain profile attributes, including demographics, geography, or behavior for generating high-value segments. Marketers eliminate the manual tasks typically required to implement targeting and personalization. Instead they can automate profiling and segmentation as well dynamically serve visitors with the most relevant web content, product, offers, and navigation. As a result customers receive compelling online experiences and retailers enjoy increased conversion rates, improved customer satisfaction, and maximized online business revenue.

Streamlining Retail Operations

Business Automation

For any retailer, a single business process, whether related to managing inventory, accounting, or vendors can be very complex and require multiple levels of approval. The automation of one business process alone can amount to millions of dollars in savings and put a company far ahead of it competitors.

Most large retailers tend to host and process information across a number of different systems, including CRM, PIM, ERP, and other programs across the enterprise. This results in inefficient processes and decreased business agility, such as poor inventory management and inability to respond to unforeseen surges in customer requests. Autonomy's technology differentiates itself from the competition by providing over 400 connectors into different repositories and providing over 500 advanced functions. This enables retailers to leverage a single platform for providing a comprehensive view of the organization and automating critical business operations.

Autonomy's scalable architecture also allows for hundreds of millions of transactions to take place within the internal ordering processes of a retail company, while at the same time ensuring that items with that are out of stock or discontinued are never sold.

Legal Solution

Any large retail organization faces significant litigation considerations. Responding to these challenges can be a time consuming and expensive process, whilst any failure to sufficiently respond to litigation or investigation actions can result in sanctions and spoliation claims. Autonomy's suite of Legal solutions differentiates itself from the competition by providing a comprehensive, end-to-end service for records management, legal hold and early case assessment, and archiving and compliance. Retailers are able to search, collect, preserve and analyze digital information to safeguard themselves from transactional disputes, legal audits, and litigation.

Case Studies

Tesco

Tesco is the leading grocery retailer in the UK and first to offer Internet-based home shopping in UK. With competitors at its heels, Tesco sought a solution that would enable it to provide visitors with personalized, up-to-the-minute price updates and offers. At the same time, Tesco needed a system that could scale to accommodate the retailer's global expansion goals. Tesco selected Autonomy Interwoven because it provided web content management technology that was able to meet the unique challenges of the web. With thousands of customers accessing Tesco.com every hour, it is imperative the retailer have the ability to instantly post new product information and promotional discounts. By automating its content distribution and publishing processes, Autonomy Interwoven enabled the retailer to react quickly to market fluctuations and reduce costs by nearly 80 percent. Sales have even jumped in some of Tesco's division by as much as five to tenfold.

Avis

Avis and its subsidiaries operate one of the world's leading car rental brands, providing business and leisure customers with a wide range of services in approximately 2,200 locations in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Latin American / Caribbean region. Avis selected the Autonomy Interwoven suite of Web Content Management products to add real business value through Virage MediaBin for Rich Media Management, TeamSite for Web Content Management, and Optimost for Multivariable Testing of its web pages. Together the suite enables Avis to respond faster to customer demand and reduce operational costs.

In the past five years, Avis has quadrupled its online revenue, which now represents more than 20% of the company's total revenue and the intelligence Avis is gleaning from the Optimost tool offers the promise for additional growth going forward.

Click here to watch the AVIS video case study.

Virgin Mobile

Virgin Mobile resells mobile network operators' airtime under its own brand, and differentiates its services by providing customers with a significantly better quality of service than larger, more highly capitalized operators. Until recently, Virgin Mobile's outdated web infrastructure made this kind of premium experience almost impossible to deliver. Complex workflows and hard-coded development meant that any change to the public website, from minor copy changes to new product launches, took 4–6 weeks to execute, undermining the speed and agility needed to support the company's growing business and appeal to its all-important 16–24 year old market.

Virgin Mobile implemented Autonomy Interwoven as part of a project designed to deliver best-in-class usability and customer experience. The new, customer-centered Virgin Mobile website provides upgraded eCommerce capabilities, improved self-service, and more efficient provisioning of products and services—all made possible through integration of the Autonomy Interwoven-powered web front-end with 15 back-end applications. The online channel revenue increased from 6% to 30% and cost effective self-service online interactions have increased by 80%. With a more responsive, customer-driven website, Virgin Mobile was awarded the Telecom "Site of the Year" Award in 2006 by UK Internet users.

Costco

Costco first approached Autonomy to create a platform to automate its Margin Adjustment Form. Dealing with 60,000 forms valuing in excess of $1 Billion per year, these forms need to be secure and legally binding. Autonomy's eForm solution enables internal staff and external suppliers from all over the world to collaborate in the creation, execution, capture, and sharing of item agreement forms and ancillary documents, and supports secure mechanisms for communication, access control, data and document storage, as well as supporting thousands of concurrent users and the associated transaction loads. Moreover, unprecedented scalability enables support of a wide variety of future collaborative applications, as well as integration with legacy processes and iSeries (i5OS) applications and data

Following on from the successful implementation of this solution, Costco then upgraded their partnership with Autonomy to a full eDiscovery suite. Implementing Aungate Legal Hold with Notification Management and Preservation & Collection, Costco is now able to search, collect, preserve and analyze digital information and that will provide the ability to place legal holds on digital information. Costco's IT department identified the value of having one solution that could meet Costco's end-to-end eDiscovery requirements as a key differentiator in selecting Autonomy over the competition.

Northwest Airlines

Northwest is part of Delta Air Lines, which is the world's largest airline, offering more than 170 million passengers each year service to 379 destinations in 66 countries. The online channel plays a key role in Northwest's business and is an important channel for sales and customer service as well as managing relationships with frequent flyer program members. The airline turned to Autonomy Optimost's Multivariable Testing solution as a way to help drive decisions about site and funnel design and to evolve the company's data driven organization. As a result of testing, NWA has increased its annual site revenue by $3 million to date.

Office Depot

An S&P 500 company, Office Depot uses Autonomy solutions to delivery legal and business continuity across the organization. Autonomy Introspect's Notifications, Preservations and Collections deliver a unique end-to-end solution that would have otherwise required the licensing of 4 or 5 different solution provider vendors to achieve the same results.

GAME Group Plc

GAME Group Plc is the leading specialist retailer of video and PC game products in Europe. Since it started trading in 1991, it has grown from 11 stores in the UK to a 1,161-store chain. With a goal to increase site conversions and online revenue, GAME turned to Autonomy Optimost. After an aggressive competitive search, GAME selected Autonomy Optimost due to the strong account management capabilities. Over an 8 week period, GAME examined how visitors used and engaged with its website and used the four navigational areas it considered to have the greatest impact on sales. For example, tests on the search bar examined call to action options, the importance of advanced search and what combinations brought visitors deeper into site. Tests on the promotional code box examined presentation options to ease the flow for visitors who did and didn't have a code. The results: an extra 14,000 people completed orders on the site which translated into a revenue increase of nearly $1M.

John Lewis

John Lewis is a leading retailer in the UK that consists of 26 department stores, John Lewis Direct, 185 Waitrose supermarkets, and Greenbee direction services. In an effort to drive landing page conversions from Johnlewis.com, the company turned to Autonomy Optimost. Through a series of multivariable testing experiments across its homepage, its product page, the log-in page and basket page supported by the Autonomy Optimost Marketing Optimization solution, the company saw a 75% lift in conversions, generating substantial increases in revenues. Tests tied to the log-in process alone, where it was determined that adding copy was a complication to the buying process and was removed, generated an additional $5 million in sales over 12 months.

LOVEFiLM

LOVEFiLM, Europe's leading online DVD rental and games subscription service with over 600,000 members, over 65,000 titles, and 2.5 million rentals a month, realized the impact that driving improvements to their website would deliver. LOVEFiLM turned to Autonomy Optimost to drive an increase in new online subscribers. Within the first 4 weeks the results surpassed their expectations. In the first round of testing, LOVEFiLM saw a 10 percent increase in subscription conversions on their website which will generate an estimated 7 figure revenue jump annually.

Roku

Roku is a market leader in innovative applications for digital media, opening up a new world of entertainment to the TV. Like many online retailers, the company was looking for a cost effective way to grow the business. Roku was looking for a technology partner that had innovative technology, proven success, and a strong team to deliver strategic guidance and best practices. After evaluating multiple vendors, Roku selected Autonomy Optimost's marketing optimization platform to optimize pricing and the overall website experience using multivariable testing. Results from the test, increased online sales dramatically, including a double-digit percentage in sales volume with one optimization initiative. Roku has also applied learnings from their online tests and optimization initiatives to other areas of marketing, such as figuring out what core value messages works for their online audience and then integrating it across all other campaigns.

Callaway Golf Pre-Owned

Callaway Golf Pre-Owned is the official source for Certified Pre-Owned Callaway Golf products. The division of Callaway Golf sells the trade-in models of the world-leading supplier of premium golf equipment. More than 3,000 retailers throughout the United States supply Callaway Golf Pre-Owned with inventory. Callaway Golf Pre-Owned had a pressing demand to improve the shopping experience at www.callawaygolfpreowned.com. The challenge is that Callaway Golf Pre-Owned's product line is extensive, and changes frequently. Out of 60,000 potential SKUs, Callaway Golf Pre-Owned typically makes available about 5,000 products with more than half of these products carrying two or less items in stock. Complicating matters is the incredible depth of the product line. The retailer regularly exposes multiple variations of the same product.

Callaway selected IDOL, the only solution that met the retailer's requirements for functionality, flexibility. Introducing IDOL to www.callawaygolfpreowned.com proved quick and painless. IDOL has helped increase sales at www.callawaygolfpreowned.com by steering customers to their desired products, quickly and easily.