In keeping with tradition, RichRelevance hosted its 5th Annual Hack Week last week uniting the best and the brightest within our Science, Operations and Engineering Organizations. Working together, the teams developed some of the most innovative products and product enhancements we’ve ever seen in RichRelevance history.
In the spirit of free thinking, {rr} Hack Week is governed by few rules and little direction, to give way to big ideas and unique problem solving approaches. That said, a little inspiration is always needed, so before unleashing their inner creativity and digging into their projects we offered the team some simple suggestions:
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Feel free to choose something that interests you and that is relevant to our customers
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You are encouraged to collaborate with other teams within the company – some great ideas and skillsets can be found outside of Engineering
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Most importantly, have fun
Our 5th Annual Hack Week kicked off on Friday, April 8th with 16 projects in development. The week culminated in a 2 1/2 hour demo-thon last Friday, and I was amazed by the innovative and diverse projects showcased. The presentations included production quality demos, great insight into current data trends, extremely useful dev/ops/QA tools, as well as new approaches to pattern recognition that would make any geek swoon.
Our esteemed judges reviewed each presentation and awarded prizes to the following projects best on five categories: Unsung Hero, Geekiest, Raving Fan, Fan Favorite, Best in Show.
And the winners were, [drum roll please]…
Unsung Hero: Not flashy but makes a difference
Team Project Name:
“Parquet data format with prestoDB and data visualization”
100 Foot Overview:
Converted raw logs into a new queryable format, enabling space savings, incredible speeds, and data visualization.
Geekiest: Most algorithmic
Team Project Name:
“Fast CTR Prediction with FTRL”
100 Foot Overview:
Reimagined how we predict clicks, by creating an algorithm that decreases execution time to <1 minute, provides better accuracy, is memory efficient, and enables incremental data, it does it all!
Raving Fan: What will make customers jump for joy
Team Project Name:
“Weather based targeting and rules”
100 Foot Overview:
A fully new take on the infrastructure to pull in weather data, categorize it by type, geocode and build models that enable users to target content and rules by types of weather that is/will be occurring.
A Double Whammy! Winning 2 Awards:
Fan Favorite: Voted on by the masses
Best In Show: Overall the most impressive. This project checked all the boxes: impressive technology, great presentation, humor and something that our customers could really benefit from.
Team Project Name:
“Deep learning technology for new rec strategies”
100 Foot Overview:
Here the team did something really interesting – leveraging some of our existing deep learning technology to produce some new and interesting recommendation strategies (we’re keeping top secret for now :))
A big congratulations to the winners and to everyone to participated! This year we had some of the best submissions in RichRelevance Hack Week history. All projects were super ambitious and visionary for our company and products. We are looking forward to incorporating these ideas into our future product roadmap. For more geeky fun, stay tuned for updates from the {rr} 2016.2 Hack Week happening later this year.
Barneys New York uses the Relevance Cloud™ personalization platform to digitally enhance in-store service and engagement through customer-centric personalization
San Francisco, CA — April 25, 2016 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today announced that Barneys New York is using the Relevance Cloud™ personalization platform to power a first-in-kind digital customer experience at its new flagship store in downtown Manhattan.
The new store offers a unique and timeless luxury shopping experience, with an emphasis on bringing digital aspects into the store with state-of-the-art technology. Barneys New York is the first luxury retailer to integrate iBeacon technology with the Relevance Cloud personalization platform to deliver personalized editorial content to store shoppers. Barneys New York is also using the Relevance Cloud to connect online and offline behaviors and preferences to help sales associates better serve their clients via a customer clienteling app.
These innovations enhance the customer experience with instant access to informative and entertaining content, while also ensuring that associates are highly informed and have better background information on brands and products of interest to each individual consumer.
“The customer experience in this store runs parallel in importance to the design, product and historic location,” Barneys New York COO, Daniella Vitale, commented at launch. ”We want the customer to feel as though anything is possible when they walk into the store. With the seamless integration of technology, our incredible staff, and a deep appreciation of our customer, we really do feel that everything is possible.”
Content Personalization: iBeacons & The Relevance Cloud
Barneys New York is using iBeacon technology to share informative and relevant content (videos, look books and designer interviews) from The Window, Barneys luxury editorial site, with shoppers as they move about the store. Beacons are integrated with the Relevance Cloud platform to deliver personalized recommendations of content to users who choose to opt-in for this experience via the award-winning Barneys New York app. The app also delivers personalized notifications when a shopper nears items in their mobile shopping bags or on wishlists, creating a seamless and efficient shopping experience for the knowledgeable Barneys customer.
“The most important touchpoint is the phone,” Barneys Vice President of Digital, Matthew Woolsey, recently told Digiday. “We’re proud of the way we’ve used our customer data online and offline to be fluidly connected — it allows for a personalized, consistent experience in store and online.”
Data-Driven Clienteling & The Endless Aisle
Barneys New York is also using RichRelevance to power a new clienteling system that uses customer-centric personalization to empower sales associates to better serve their clients. The clienteleing app is available on associates’ iPads, which are also used as mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) devices with Apple Pay.
Through the Relevance Cloud personalization platform, the new clienteling app connects consumer, product and inventory data to deliver personalized product and content recommendations based on each shopper’s unique history with Barneys New York. The app also provides ‘endless aisle’ capabilities: associates can access inventory across all Barneys New York stores and, from the store floor, key an order to be fulfilled immediately.
“Luxury is at a place where we can make strategic investments for our brand, rather than playing catch up everywhere,” continued Woolsey in his Digiday interview. “The goal is to create an elevated customer expectation.”
These new digital initiatives build on a long-term partnership between Barneys New York and RichRelevance to personalize the digital experience, including an increased focus on personalization in Barneys recent redesign of its digital platforms barneys.com and editorial site the window.barneys.com.
Explained RichRelevance CEO, Eduardo Sanchez: “Luxury shoppers expect a premium experience and personalized service at every touchpoint. By extending the Relevance Cloud into the store, Barneys has become the first luxury retailer to use iBeacon technology content and consumer insights to bring a more personalized and editorially-driven experience to customers everywhere they shop.”
About Barneys New York
Barneys New York (Barneys) is a luxury specialty retailer renowned for having the most discerning edit from the world’s top designers, including women’s and men’s ready-to-wear, accessories, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics, fragrances, and gifts for the home. Barneys’ signature sense of wit and style is manifested in its creative advertising campaigns, original holiday themes, and celebrated window displays. Founded as a men’s retailer in 1923 in downtown Manhattan, it became an international arbiter of high style for both women and men in the 1970s, renowned for discovering and developing new and innovative design talent. Today, Barneys New York operates flagship stores uptown on Madison Avenue and downtown in Chelsea in New York City, as well as additional flagships in Beverly Hills, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, along with a preeminent luxury online store, Barneys.com, as well as 18 other stores and outlets across the United States. For more information about Barneys New York, please visit www.Barneys.com and explore its luxury content site, The Window, for an insider’s look into the Barneys world: a behind-the-scenes visit with exciting designers, fashion, events, and the Barneys team.
PRESS CONTACTS
Renee Newby
BPR for RichRelevance
757.651.6554
Analysis of Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 500 Guide shows RichRelevance is top personalization vendor based on client revenues
San Francisco, CA — April 19, 2015 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today announced that it is the #1 personalization vendor for the Internet Retailer 500. The top ranking is based on a combined $67.7 billion in online sales across RichRelevance’s clients listed in Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 500 Guide®.
According to analysis of Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 500 Guide® data, RichRelevance’s customer base represents nearly 50% more online revenue than the nearest competitive vendor. RichRelevance also significantly outperformed Oracle (#7), Adobe (#8) and Salesforce (#13) in the personalization category with more than double the client revenue of all three platforms combined ($29.4 billion).
Retailers who named RichRelevance as their personalization vendor include prominent retail brands such as Best Buy, Costco, Dell, GoPro, JC Penney, Kohl’s, L.L. Bean, Macys, Office Depot, REI, Under Armour and Walgreens, as well as luxury leaders Barneys New York, Burberry, L’Oreal, Michael Kors, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and others.
“RichRelevance ranks #1 for personalization in the Internet Retailer 500 because of the powerful advantages the Relevance Cloud platform offers for large retailers,” said Eduardo Sanchez, President and CEO of RichRelevance. “We remain completely focused on strengthening the Relevance Cloud by building and bringing in the best technology, whether for call center, POS, search or even virtual reality, to support digital sales in a complex omnichannel environment.”
More than 240 leading retailers use the Relevance Cloud to power personalized content, offers and product recommendations to shoppers across web, mobile, call center and store. Forrester Consulting recently found that the Relevance Cloud personalization platform delivers revenue increases of at least 10% and over $400K in annual maintenance savings. The open, real-time personalization platform combines advanced data science with a world-class Hadoop installation and 12 global data centers that support more than one billion decisions per day.
Sanchez continued: “Faced with an explosion of marketing systems and customer data, our clients are using the Relevance Cloud to unify customer information and orchestrate a real-time customer experience that is consistent – and continuous – across every touchpoint. This is a crucial strategic advantage for our clients, and a significant re-writing of the retail CMO playbook to online and offline sales.”
Methodology: The ranking is based on RichRelevance’s analysis of the collective online revenue of the client bases of the personalization vendors represented in Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 500 Guide®. The annual Guide provides exclusive rankings and analysis of North America’s 500 leading e-retailers. The merchants ranked in the 2016 Top 500 Guide represent collective U.S. web sales of $286.2 billion, an 84% share of total e-commerce sales in 2015.
PRESS CONTACTS
Renee Newby
BPR for RichRelevance
757.651.6554
50 years ago, a unique, real-time personalised customer experience was the norm. You loyally entered your local store, were served by a brand who knew your preferences, offered help, and could reserve, deliver or sell goods in a way that suited you. Today, consumer expectations haven’t changed, but their purchasing channels have.
Real-time personalisation goes further than the personalised email marketing you often find from brands online. It means being able to serve relevant, compelling information during a live interaction with a consumer that is only milliseconds long. Real-time personalisation has the power to encourage consumers to complete the purchasing process and develops a loyalty that pays dividends long term.
RichRelevance has been shortlisted for TWO Retail Week Customer Experience Awards 2016. We are thrilled about showcasing our omnichannel personalisation work with Monsoon Accessorize, and look forward to the event in London this June! Find out more here.
What does digital transformation really mean and what is the impact for companies of a ‘digital first’ strategy? In this article Marketing Week looks at several companies who have executed digital transformation including RichRelevance customer, Shop Direct and how they transformed their business from 72% catalogue sales to 100% online in just 3 years with the help of user experience, data analytics and personalization.