IBM Unveils Additions to Real-Time Personalization & Commerce Insights

IBM announced the expansion of their product portfolio today, bringing in new “cognitive technologies” to bolster their Real-Time Personalization & Commerce Insights solutions.

The plan is to empower marketers and e-commerce professionals to learn, predict and guide customer engagement throughout custom brand journeys.

IBM: Impressive Returns

According to a recent report from Nucleus Research, IBM delivers a $15.82 return on investment (ROI) for every dollar spent on its marketing, sales, merchandising and analytics products. Those offerings are used today by the likes of ING Direct and The Home Shopping Network.

With these announcements, IBM is merging cognitive technologies into existing tools that practitioners already work with to deliver complete end-to-end customer experiences.

“Every customer is unique and has little tolerance for businesses that fail to recognize their specific interests, wants and needs,” said Harriet Green, General Manager, Watson IoT, Commerce and Education, IBM. “Today we continue to invest in building our portfolio which includes new cognitive solutions that will completely transform how companies serve each customer. Businesses will be able to quickly understand, reason and learn from every customer interaction – and put that knowledge to use to uncover new opportunities from insights.”

IBM Real-Time Personalization

With IBM Real-Time Personalization, marketers can deliver the right message and offer to customers every time.

Part of the IBM Marketing Cloud, Real-Time Personalization understands that a person’s preferences change over time and addresses this through its Cognitive Rule Adviser, which learns, advises and suggests the offer and message should be shared with each visitor. It then discovers which segments are responding best to each variation (broken down by factors such as age, geography, etc..) and through self-learning algorithms and analytics fine-tunes the experiences over time.

For example, a sporting goods retailer identifies a customer whose site profile indicates they are interested in taking up cycling. Recognizing she’s a novice, the site responds with deals on bikes and everything she needs to get started, all presented with visual images that help her make the right purchase. Through its cognitive technologies, the site later learns that her needs have shifted based on activity focused on nutrition for long-distance rides, automatically adapts and shares content on local races and nutrition recommendations and offers on foods items in the store.

IBM Commerce Insights

IBM also announced new cognitive technologies in Commerce Insights, which provides merchandizers with a real-time view of their business, specifically focused on how products and categories are performing.

Now, with new cognitive-powered category sequencing capabilities, the site automatically places products on a web page based current demand and inventory and adapts the sequencing as sales and inventory levels change.

Commerce Insights is also infusing cognitive into its anomaly detection capabilities so teams are automatically alerted to significant spikes and dips in sales and presented contributing factors such as inventory, promotional event, channel activities and soon input from social sentiment and competitive pricing.

For example, a retailer receives two messages from the solution’s Notification Center. First, the team is alerted that inventory on the new 4K TVs are running low.

Through its cognitive category sequencing capabilities, the site automatically re-order products on the page so the items with low inventory levels are dropped down until new shipments are received. A second alert identifies a top video game consoles that’s not selling as projected and automatically discovers that the issue is caused by a shift in competitor pricing.

With this insight, it recommends the retailer lower their offering price and shows what the resulting margin will be so they are prepared for a sudden surge in sales.

To find out more, visit the IBM website.