Over the past few years, there has been a big push towards personalized ecommerce experiences. With the rise in mobile shopping, customers want to find what they’re looking for quickly and move on. This means fewer abandoned sessions and more conversions.
So, how can we add true ecommerce personalization to our sites? That’s where Salesforce Einstein comes in.
Einstein is the umbrella term that refers to Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform. Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) offers a suite of AI-powered tools designed to help give shoppers a personalized shopping experience and to help merchandisers with some administrative tasks in Business Manager.
There are five tools provided in the SFCC Einstein suite:
- Einstein Product Recommendations
- Commerce Insights
- Einstein Search Dictionaries
- Einstein Predictive Sort
- Einstein Search Recommendations.
These powerful commerce tools can be enabled individually so you can choose which tools are best for your needs.
As a certified SFCC Developer, SFCC Architect, and Tech Lead at CQL, I will expand on these five tools and how they can assist with personalizing the shopping experience for your customers.
Einstein Product Recommendations
The Einstein Product Recommendations tool allows merchandisers to set up AI-driven product recommendations, which can help guide customers to products tailored to their interests. Einstein tracks how the customer is interacting with the site in order to determine which products would be most relevant to the customer and returns a personalized list of results.
To set this up, merchandisers first need to configure a Recommender, which defines what strategy will be used by Einstein when determining which product recommendations to return. Merchandisers will then configure a content slot on the site as a recommendation slot and specify the recommender to use for the slot.
Once configured, the content slot will begin displaying the personalized recommendations. These recommendations can be as basic as showing the current customer’s recently viewed products or can be more advanced, such as on a PDP, showing what other customers ultimately ended up purchasing.
Commerce Insights
The Commerce Insights tool collects shopper, order, and product data from your site, which can then be used to help merchandisers make data-driven decisions around product offerings.
Commerce Insights provides a dashboard where merchandisers can view the aggregated product data to see which products are performing well and which products are frequently purchased together. They can then use that information to help create effective promos and product bundles.
Einstein Search Dictionaries
The Einstein Search Dictionaries are another tool designed to help merchandisers improve the search experience on the site. This tool tracks the searches performed on the site and reports popular search terms that are not included in the search dictionaries.
Einstein takes this a step further by using machine learning to suggest how these terms should be added to the search dictionaries, which helps resolve the gaps.
For instance, if a search for the color “salmon” on an apparel site isn’t returning results, it may recommend adding “salmon” to your synonym dictionary as a synonym for “pink”. To improve the AI recommendations, you can opt-in to sharing your search data on the community database, which offers a much larger data set for training the AI.
Einstein Predictive Sort
Einstein Predictive Sort offers personalized sorting rules for the product grid based on the current customer’s browsing behavior. Once set up, Einstein will track the customer’s interactions on the site to determine which products they might want to purchase. It will then start to rank those products higher in the product grid sort order to help get the relevant products in front of the customer. This can be done for explicit searches on the site as well as for browsing categories.
Einstein Search Recommendations
The Einstein Search Recommendations functionality expands the site search by adding several new features, such as personalized search term completion, personalized search suggestions, and popular or trending search phrase suggestions.
As with the product recommendations and predictive sort features, Einstein monitors how the customer is browsing the site to determine which products they would most likely be interested in and uses this data to help personalize their search phrase recommendations.
Einstein also keeps track of the overall search data on the site and uses predictive intelligence to update the list of popular and trending search terms in real-time. These features help the customer find the most relevant products and minimize the chance of no results being found.
Interested in SFCC’s Einstein AI Platform?
As you can see, there are some powerful tools available which can help elevate your site’s shopping experience. If you are interested in any of these five tools, or want to know more about SFCC’s Einstein AI platform, contact us today and one of our talented, certified SFCC developers will be in touch!
