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
Recently we participated in the event E-Commerce One to One in Monaco. In its sixth year, it yet again proved to be THE event for ecommerce leaders. With over 1,000 carefully selected participants, the three-day event made for a rich exchange of ideas and innovations.
Some of the key topics discussed ranged from the shopping experience on mobile devices and developing a ‘mobile first strategy’ to customer service excellence and loyalty programmes. A survey of retailers attending the event uncovered the following top six investment priorities for retailers in 2016:
- Creating excellence in customer service
- Enhancing the shopping experience for mobile
- Building customer-centric financial indicators
- Developing a mobile first strategy
- Building innovations for loyalty programmes
- Developing branded content
For RichRelevance, E-Commerce One to One represented an opportunity not just to make new acquaintances, but also to meet and network with existing customers through dinners and receptions. The speaking sessions also featured one of our valued customers —children’s apparel retailer, Petit Bateau — who presented a workshop about their omnichannel journey with us.
In her workshop, CRM & Digital Director, Christel Hennion talked about the challenges faced by Petit Bateau and why they needed an omnichannel approach. With nearly half (44%) of their customers first searching online before visiting a store, Petit Bateau needed to connect online and offline sales channels to better understand their customers so they could make the right omnichannel recommendation.
To do this, Petit Bateau leverages RichRelevance’s user profile service to gather and access the necessary information about their customer both online and offline. With this customer knowledge, Petit Bateau used RichRelevance product recommendations to personalize the relevant offer on each channel for their shoppers. As a result, they have seen increased engagement and frequency of purchase from their customers.
Petit Bateau also shared an interesting cohort analysis. Even though a small percentage of shoppers interact with product recommendations, this segment represents 50% of orders and 60% of global turnover.
This segment leverages personalization as a means of navigation and catalogue discovery. They are often strongly committed and provide high value to the retailer.
See the E-Commerce One to One blog post for more on Christel’s talk.
Similarly, Google presented a separate workshop where they further expanded on the topic of analysing the influence of online and offline sales, again using Petit Bateau as the example. Laureline Serieys, Retail Industry Head at Google, discussed how they helped Petit Bateau map their customer journey and measure the influence of online and offline purchases. Read more on this session here.
Thanks to all those we met at E-Commerce One to One! The stellar group made it such an insightful event to attend. We’re looking forward to 2017 already.
Although we may not be flying around in rocket ships quite yet, retail today is about as futuristic as anyone could have imagined. It’s hard to envision a world without the 24/7 on-demand access to the endless aisles of ecommerce retail. Personalization has played a huge role in, not only the success of companies like Amazon, but the advancements in ecommerce and retail as a whole. Personalization has enabled retailers to create digital channels that feel as intimate and customer-oriented as a physical store; so over time consumers feel recognized as unique individuals in their shopping journeys.
So what is next in the world of retail personalization?
In an effort to identify the top of mind personalization trends for retailers and brands in 2016, RichRelevance reviewed the requests for proposals (RFPs) from 2015. The retailer RFPs reviewed were largely represented by Internet Retailer’s Top 100 in North America and were retailers who made over $75 billion in aggregated revenue.
Overall, we can see how retailers are uniting the consumer experience. Over the next year, retailers will leverage personalization to bring together all digital and physical channels – to create true omnichannel customer experiences based on three key trends.
Trend 1: Completing Personalization
Retailers today are laser focused on enhancing shopper experiences by using data that is readily available across channels. With every additional touch point and channel, retailers have been granted the gift of data. Until now little has been done to leverage the information retailers have gathered and most of the data has not been synthesized to create an omnichannel experience. To fully implement personalization retailers require a powerful personalization platform to ingest retail data from feeds such as smartphones, tablets, point-of-sale systems, inventory and contact centers. The more data points a retailer collects and integrates, the more seamless a customer experience becomes across channels.
For example, consider how things might be merchandised in stores versus how they’re displayed online – what departments are physically next to each other or across the aisle, and how leveraging purchase data from the store could positively impact online engagement and sales.
Integrating personalization from third party vendors and channels also plays a crucial role in unifying all the elements of the consumer’s physical and digital world. By influencing personalization with geographic, demographic, weather and loyalty components adds an incremental layer of sophistication and relevance.
Trend 2: Enabling Smarter Associates
Tying directly into Trend 1, leads us to the next trend of enabling smarter associates. Today’s retailer wants to enable customer-facing personnel with digital technologies to help associates deliver in real time the highest level of customer service possible. By using a personalization platform that synthesizes human intelligence with artificial intelligence the retail associate can leverage all cross channel customer data, product details and content at every interaction.
One of the biggest challenges in retail is bringing together all shopping channels to deliver a seamless customer experience. An ideal experience has no friction, so that when a consumer walks into a store or calls the contact center, the retail representative already knows everything that customer has looked at, purchased and even returned over the years. To solve this problem of eliminating friction to consumers, retailers are launching a variety of associate-facing applications for use in stores and even contact centers. These applications recall all previous and current customer behaviors/purchases in real time so that an associate can offer a level of customer service that is complementary to the individual’s history, tastes and preferences.
Enabling smarter associates will also play a big role in personalizing contact or call centers. By leveraging different types of clienteling applications, agents will no longer need to spend time determining who a shopper is or what they want. The application will give the agent a real-time view into recent browsing history and purchases across channels to offer a relevant response right from the start.
Trend 3: Launching Tech Savvy Stores
In an effort to combat the strong footprint that the Amazon and other pure play ecommerce retailers have acquired over the last decade, multichannel retailers are bringing technology to the storefront. Retailers are creating unique and innovative shopping experiences to tend to the zero-friction shopping needs of the modern consumer.
A great example of in-store innovation includes the Intelligent Fitting Rooms that leverage RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags to recognize clothing that is brought into the fitting room. By integrating this technology in the fitting room, retailers can help shoppers find alternate sizes and offer intelligent recommendations to suggest alternatives or assist in completing a look.
In summary, this is the year of a unified customer experience placing great focus on cross-channel shoppers, anticipating their needs and catering to them with services that previously didn’t exist. The three trends of completing personalization, enabling smarter associates and launching tech savvy stores create an sophisticated and seamless omnichannel experience for the shopper, and ultimately allow personalization technologies to influence even more of the consumer experience than ever before.
For more 2016 insights visit us at our RelevanceTV YouTube channel.
The year of 2015 has been tremendous for RichRelevance and for the retail industry at large. While I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished as an organization, I’m even more excited about the success of our customers and the ways in which they are leveraging RichRelevance to traverse the omnichannel customer journey by building personalized experiences. Today, omnichannel initiatives are on everyone’s priority list, personalization is more important than ever, innovations in retail are starting to reap dividends and Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Information Officers are partnering ever more closely.
This past year was filled with many milestones for RichRelevance. We launched an entirely new Relevance Cloud Omnichannel Personalization Platform, powered hundreds of ecommerce websites, mobile apps, in-store and contact center experiences; and 77 major retail brands around the globe chose Relevance Cloud as their independent personalization platform. This is an addition to an esteemed list of 240 brands that already use Relevance Cloud.
We innovated by opening our core personalization platform, releasing new services like user profile service, strategy publishing service and more. We also launched Engage, a new product for content and promotion personalization. Many more customers extended RichRelevance to cover mobile devices, in addition to email, stores and even contact centers, with each of our omnichannel products.
Our research and development efforts have enabled us to become the provider of the only fully- featured, independent and open personalization platform in the market. This allows us to support all your omnichannel projects and any other innovative customer experience you may launch in the coming years.
This technical leadership has allowed us to secure the top spot as the leader in omnichannel personalization for the fifth year in a row according to Internet Retailer. We also launched our twelfth global datacenter in Tokyo, Japan bringing global latency under 100ms. Finally, we held our first customer conferences in Europe and North America.
Along with our customers, we’re on an incredible journey. Our vision is to enable any company to personalize all customer interactions. As referenced in the recent Digiday article, “How Barneys is digitizing its New York City flagship store,” we are helping retailers like Barneys to equip store associates with real-time customer data using best cloud and mobile personalization technologies.
And we’re helping some of the biggest retailers in the world, like Office Depot, build cloud-based experiences that are inherently personalized and seamless. Never before has Marketing and IT partnership had such an important role in the enterprise, and it’s a great honor for us to tie them together and be a part of that transformation for our customers.
The year 2015 was also transformational for the RichRelevance ecosystem. We deepened our partnerships with world’s best technology and services providers such as Accenture, HookLogic, StarMount and several others to enable a best-of-breed personalization technology stack.
As we march down 2016, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for your partnership and your support. Thank you for being an inspiring community of forward-thinking, innovation-driven, consumer-first, omnichannel-loving retailers. Let’s keep doing great things together.
Best wishes for a successful 2016!
– Eduardo Sanchez
Search-driven analytics empowers everyone with instant insight into omnichannel personalization and KPIs through the Relevance Cloud™ platform
San Francisco, CA — November 19, 2015 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, and ThoughtSpot, the leader in search-driven analytics, today announced a strategic partnership to help retailers more easily and effectively analyze complex data and derive new value from omnichannel personalization. ThoughtSpot integrates its technology with the independent Relevance Cloud™ platform, which provides the most complete personalization solution for large retailers.
Today’s partnership enhances the Relevance Cloud with new analytics technology to rapidly gauge the impact and effectiveness of personalization and fine-tune omnichannel programs for maximum performance. Relevance Cloud business users can now search to analyze complex omnichannel data (online, offline, on-premise CRM, third-party) through an intuitive search interface similar to consumer search engines. The industry-first integration allows companies to cut through marketing and data silos to easily access personalization data; understand KPIs by channel, campaign and program; and orchestrate more effective omnichannel programs.
“RichRelevance is bringing the best third-party technology into the independent Relevance Cloud personalization platform,” said RichRelevance President and CEO Eduardo Sanchez. “ThoughtSpot, our newest partner in this effort, strengthens the Relevance Cloud with a new breed of intuitive and responsive business intelligence. Using our platform, retailers can understand and improve complex omnichannel efforts to match their own specific requirements.”
More than 230 leading retailers use the Relevance Cloud to power personalized content, offers and product recommendations to shoppers across web, mobile 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. ThoughtSpot offers search-driven analytics built for the enterprise. Business users across Fortune 1000 organizations use ThoughtSpot with zero training to analyze complex company data and build reports and dashboards – all in seconds.
“With Relevance Cloud and ThoughtSpot, business users can easily access omnichannel data – generated by consumers, retailers and third parties– from a simple search interface,” said Ajeet Singh, co-founder and CEO, ThoughtSpot. “The result is analytics at human scale that instantly provide answers to everyone in a retail organization about the value and effectiveness of personalization.”
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the global leader in omnichannel personalization and is used by more than 230 multinational companies to deliver the most relevant and innovative customer experiences across web, mobile and in store. RichRelevance drives more than one billion decisions every day, and has generated over $20 billion in sales for its clients, which include Office Depot, Costco, Marks & Spencer and Darty.
Headquartered in San Francisco, RichRelevance serves clients in 42 countries from 9 offices around the globe. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com.
About ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is disrupting the BI industry with search-driven analytics built for the enterprise. Anyone can use ThoughtSpot with zero training to ask questions, analyze company data, and build reports and dashboards – all in seconds. ThoughtSpot can combine data from on-premise, desktop and cloud sources, and Hadoop, can scale to billions of rows, and can be deployed in hours. The days of waiting for reports and dashboards are over.
ThoughtSpot founders have a track record of building market-defining search and analytics technologies at companies such as Google, Amazon, Oracle, and Microsoft. Based in Palo Alto, CA, ThoughtSpot is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and top-tier angel investors. For more information visit http://www.thoughtspot.com. Follow us on Twitter at @thoughtspot.
PRESS CONTACTS
Renee Newby
BPR for RichRelevance
rr@bradypr.com
757.651.6554
Sian Blevins
Eastwick for ThoughtSpot
sian@eastwick.com
212.897.2146