Navigating COVID-19: Best bets for Retailers facing tough choices
Positioning to win, today and tomorrow
The overnight shift to a digital economy is driving retailers to make difficult decisions about how they adapt. It’s digital transformation at an unprecedented velocity. To cope with change, industry experts are encouraging retailers to look to the next horizon of retail and reimagine their business. That’s no simple task when faced with the day-to-day challenges of maintaining operations. Many retailers are asking what they can do that will benefit them today, but also transform their business for the future?
While difficult, it’s important to consider both today and tomorrow. The innovations that retailers implement today can better position them to take advantage of the higher intensity digital economy going forward. According to Capgemini Research Institute, 59 percent of consumers worldwide said they had high levels of interaction with physical stores before COVID-19, but now less than a quarter see themselves in that high-interaction category. In the next 6–9 months, just 39 percent of consumers expect a high level of interaction with physical stores.
However, most retailers cannot afford to make the next investment one that will benefit them in a digital future nearly a year out. What we see retailers asking themselves is: What can I do that will help me right now, but will also position me well long-term?
The immense, hidden value of search
Product search can be easy to overlook. It’s a fundamental aspect of most e-commerce sites that, all too often, only works well for top products when the search queries are similar to the product description.
However, consider that 80 percent of shoppers will abandon a site that returns poor results, as reported by Business Insider. With consumers spending fewer overall dollars and spending more of those dollars through your e-commerce, the importance of capturing every customer search should be a priority. Otherwise, it’s money left on the table. There are few things more painful for retailers than bringing customers to your site but then missing out on dollars they want to spend with you because they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
Microsoft Bing for Commerce is a new technology that provides the next evolution of product search. It’s a SAAS solution for retailers that brings the power of Microsoft’s AI to your product search as well as your personalization and product recommendations.
To have great AI, you need great data. Over the years we’ve built an unmatched data graph. By bringing this data together with customer data, we can create incredible personalized results with new levels of relevancy. AI also supports more accurate natural language processing capable of capturing more of the searches you’re missing today such as uncommon phrasing, misspellings, and more.
Leaving money on the table is based on using dated search technology and being limited to insights from your data set alone. The twin engines of AI from Microsoft and a decade of worldwide consumer search insights can help you capture the recent wave of consumers who are newly open to new brands. If you have a search technology team in-house, these twin engines are available to the retail industry for the first time to help you turbocharge an opportunity you didn’t have the tools to unlock before. Today you may not be seeing the customers you are ‘leaking’ because you didn’t know that today’s search technology fails the long tail of customers. But there is money in the long tail.
Making your new customers, customers for life
A study conducted by BCG showed that implementing personalized experiences onsite or in marketing efforts have been shown to have a strong effect on revenue, with one study finding it had a 25 percent revenue lift. Bigcommerce.com reports that recent data also shows personalization efforts can reduce bounce rates by 20 – 30 percent.
However, providing valuable recommendations requires you to know your customers, and many retailers are seeing entirely new audiences. According to a new survey published by delivery specialist Ware2go, more than half (55%) of consumers said they’ve recently purchased from a retailer they’ve never bought from before.
Microsoft Bing for Commerce can help retailers quickly improve their customer knowledge with AI. By learning from millions of Bing shoppers all over the globe, you can create highly personalized experiences and recommend new products determined by a customer’s brand preferences, price sensitivity, seasonality, location, and more.
Microsoft Bing for Commerce helps you stay effortlessly on the latest edge of personalization and product recommendations that can meet the needs of new customers and engender long-term loyalty.
Microsoft Bing for Commerce runs on trust
Business results are critical, but not at the cost of giving up data control. Data shared with Microsoft Bing for Commerce is owned by you. Microsoft does not monetize your data. You can also delete your data, any time. Control is in your hands. Microsoft is a trusted partner to retailers for their digital future.
For retailers: Hands-on support and flexible pricing
Microsoft Bing for Commerce can help you maximize the potential of customers who are already coming to your website today. It’s like finding new customers without new spending on demand generation. In these unprecedented times, you are right to seek high impact, high certainty results, for now, and a better future. New choices mean risk, yet risks can be managed. We are offering hands-on implementation support to help ensure quick rollout that can start delivering results in just a few weeks. We are prepared to meet even the most aggressive timelines for implementation. We are also offering special pricing at this time, in recognition of pressure on the retail industry as a result of COVID-19. If there are any other accommodations that can support you in a drastic time of change, we want to hear them. We encourage you to reach out to your Microsoft Account Executive or contact us through the link below so we can understand your retail dynamics and discuss the unique potential of Microsoft Bing for Commerce for your site.
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