BloomReach Customers: Disney, Lumens and BlueJeans

By Gabriella Pirrone

December 5, 2018

Amazon, BloomReach, BloomReach Connect, commerce, content, Content Strategy, customer engagement, customer experience, Digital Customer Service, Digital Experience, Digital Experience Market, ecommerce, eCommerce Platform, Headless Commerce, personalization

As we all know, the best customers are recurring customers, but how do we keep this notion alive? Laura and I attended BloomReach Connect 2018 a few months ago in one of the tech capitals, San Francisco, California, where we were very excited to speak to customers who utilize the BloomReach platform to engage with their customers digital experiences.

Watch the first three of our many exclusive customer interview’s from the event below where they explain how important the decision-making process is when selecting an eCommerce platform, personalization, and how content quality can really impact the way customers engage with your online products.

An Immersive Digital Experience is Important for BlueJeans Network

Our first customer interview of the day at BloomReach Connect SF was with Mike Schramm, Director of Global eCommerce at BlueJeans Network. BlueJeans is a cloud-based video conferencing service that connects participants across a wide range of devices and conferencing platforms. It’s not often that we get to talk to a customer directly about how they chose their eCommerce platform, but with Mike’s experience in the decision making process, we were curious to hear what was important to him when selecting an eCommerce platform. He mentions flexibility but also “really being able to match our business requirements with what kind of tools that platform might have and talk a lot about API’s and having that openness” is important as well.

Also, a headless eCommerce platform has been important and Mike brought up an experience he went through when selecting a headless platform that best suited his needs “I had used a suite if you will, an eCommerce suite, a SaaS, multi-tenant ecommerce platform and we got to a point where we’re getting so sophisticated that marketers were coming in with digital marketing skills and the CMS they had wasn’t really effective, they just couldn’t get it through what we wanted and a customer experience that they were aspiring to have so we went headless”

Digital experience was of course the topic of discussion at the event and as we know, those trends are shaking up the experience and digital marketing era, so we wanted to know the kinds of trends or technologies that Mike is excited to utilize “that immersive digital experience and how important that is to everybody, especially in our business, we’re in video conferencing and we see so much of the usage and the behavior of each individual participant in a video call and so being able to have in app messaging and in app conversation that either leads to an upsell or another type of conversation with a customer would be really one of the key things for us.”

Personalization is Key for Disney

Merchandising is such a huge part of a retailed business, not to mention the strategy that needs to be curated, so we were very excited to speak with Hanna Bang, Senior Manager of Site Merchandising at The Walt Disney Company. I’m sure many of you (hopefully) know of Disney, but when it comes to their experience, they are tasked with the huge expectation of providing not only an exceptional online experience but are also known for their tremendous offline experience and as Raj mentioned in his keynote, digital merchandisers do not have it easy:

“In some way we’re all digital merchandisers, even as human beings we’re merchandising ourselves. We are our product. The promise of the DXP in this era of speed is instant merchandising. I am talking about highly curated and AI optimized product selections displayed to your customer on a personalized basis with the best of human and machine, delivered instantly and learning all the time. The result is pretty straight forward. So many merchandisers spend their life on operational tasks, loading SKUs, attributing them, managing them, publishing images, publishing product selection, publishing collections of pages, let’s wave goodbye to those days. Let's turn the merchandising function into what it is supposed to be, which is a business optimization function to get the right product to the right person. Let's do that in a way where the data science listens to the votes of the customer and dynamically renders the kind of merchandising the customer is looking for in microseconds across search pages, across category pages, across product pages of all types.”

Hanna mentioned that merchandisers should also encourage the notion to "truly use the story to make big business impacts"  but when it comes to personalization, how do you personalize Disney? Taking this on would be such a huge undertaking especially since Disney has to personalize throughout all stages of the customers life to have such an impact on someone that they will want to continuously engage with that brand.“With our challenges across how big our product offering is, the only way that we can make sure that we are servicing the right thing to you as opposed to the same thing to the masses is being able to understand like what you’re looking for, where you’ve come from and giving you that personalized experience that you know you both get at the parks but also as you’re shopping online as well” says Hanna.

Content Quality over Quantity for Lumens

Next, we sat down with Jeff Romero, Digital Marketing and SEO Manager at Lumens. Lumens is a lighting, fans, furniture and accessories store headquartered out of Sacramento, California. With content being imperative in relation to customer experience, mid-level retailers can have such a huge saturation of content so having quality content is so important. Jeff shares the success he’s found with quality content: “We figure out how people are searching for that content, what kind of answers their looking for, what those questions are, when they’re trained to renovate their homes or whatever they might be doing and we figure out hey, we can answer those questions” says Jeff. “We can actually create that content, interject it into the space and win.”

The biggest challenge in regard to content in the retail space in terms of technology, strategy or even content creation is perhaps the biggest area of opportunity for retailers. Jeff feels retailers could be leveraging technology by “working with an eCommerce platform trying to curate all that content together, find what all those questions are put it in a way that the consumer can understand it but also in a way that we can treat it easily and quickly.”

In the retail space, everyone is intimidated by Amazon, and Raj’s point that he made in his opening keynote was he was getting tired of watching brands and retailers get ‘Amazoned’ and stated: “You’re not gonna compete with Amazon by doing what Amazon does. You’re going to compete with Amazon by putting your unique brand, your unique offerings, your unique customer experience forward and the DXP is there to accelerate at a high velocity way your ability to do so. Put your best foot forward and really make sure you compete on your own terms, not on their terms.”

Brands need to really understand how their content is being consumed and to do this they should be able to measure and see the engagement of their content and what your consumers’ response is. By doing so, this will “validate your efforts going into that and are working.” Jeff says.
 

Gabriella Pirrone

Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.