Personalization engines use knowledge about customers to create and deliver an optimum experience for them and measure the impact on customer experience. These engines apply AI, advanced analytics and business rules to create meaningful experiences across channels that facilitate customer engagement and drive revenue. Personalization engines create a relevant, individualized interaction between two parties designed to enhance the recipient’s experience. A recipient can be a prospect, customer (known or anonymous) or employee (engaging with a customer or prospect). In commercial settings, the engines apply advanced analytics to interpret customer data — whether known or anonymous, behavioral or contextual — and adjust engagement based on where the customer is in their journey and how they’re interacting. The engines adapt content, offers and interactions in real time that facilitate the customer’s journey.
Gartner defines search and product discovery as applications that augment digital commerce solutions to facilitate navigation, filtering, comparisons and, ultimately, selection of products. They provide search (keyword, semantic and visual), merchandising (automation, configuration and curation of business rules) and product recommendations. These applications also provide catalog navigation (including SEO keyword automation and guided selling assistants). Personalization, optimization and analytics capabilities should also be available. Platforms are deployed as SaaS. They provide administrative tooling to enable digital commerce roles (merchandisers, content managers and search specialists) to support customer experiences via no-code. With the emergence of generative AI, conversational search and guided selling assistants are now appearing. Search and product discovery applications can provide the digital customer journey from landing on a website or app to finding the correct product and adding to basket. Search results can be highly visual, using engaging layouts and multimedia. Content other than product information, such as educational information, compliance materials, customer reviews and related news may also be included in search results to engage customers and further support buying decisions.