Chris Reddick (President and CEO at Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) begin their discussion about what advanced search can do and how it can help your business.

Part 1 of a 4-part series

RON: Good morning, Chris. Another exciting webinar day. How are you doing today? 

CHRIS: Hi, Ron. I am very well, and very much looking forward to diving in today. Today we're going to be talking about search and filtering. And this is one that we really think is going to be very helpful for folks to think about all the different nuances and how that's going to apply to your buying group scenario. 

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CHRIS: We're going to go into details about search and how underutilized it is. And then we're going to go into some nuances around how you can leverage your integrations and some of the workflows and concepts within your buying group platform to optimize for search within a group buying scenario. And then we're going to talk about filters and go into some of the refinement and filtering. 

Overall, our goal here today is to help you look at how you can optimize and plan for your roadmap with your buying group software. So with that, Ron, do you want to dive in and kick us off with an overview of search, or would it be helpful for me to throw a few high-level statistics out there about search for folks? 

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RON: Yeah, give us some statistics. Tell us how important this is, because I feel like I've seen so many sites out there that don't have search or don't do search well. And I would love to know the impact that can have on businesses. 

CHRIS: We were talking about this before the webinar. And I would say probably the number one thing that I think most businesses don't understand is that whenever someone is doing a search—statistics say generally it's about 60% to 70% of users—whenever they use the search, they are at that moment ready to buy. So when you think about it, search is an intent. It's basically a user telling you that they're ready to purchase something now. So from an analytics and tracking perspective, it's a huge opportunity.  

Now here's the other interesting thing, Ron. 70% of desktop eCommerce platform search implementations are unable to return relevant results for product-type synonyms. So if you think about it, whenever users are searching for something, they literally can type in hammer and it will not bring up hammers in the search results over hammers. 

And I can't tell you how many times I've seen different things like that, especially for buying groups, whenever we go evaluate their existing software. And think about how frustrating it is, whenever a user is trained subconsciously by using Amazon, all the time and other really powerful platforms. And then they go to a less-powerful platform and they find that it can't actually do any basic search and get any real results during the moment when their intent is to buy. We're trained to use search, because that's what works for them. 

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It's a subconscious dopamine hit, “I'm ready to buy. I'm going to go search. And now it doesn't work because this site hasn't done a great job.” So, of course, as you can imagine, this has been a passion for us over the many years we've been delivering for overall eCommerce and specifically for buyers groups. And so really what we want to do is talk for a few minutes here about the key foundational aspects of what makes search work well. 

At the end of the day, I would say you have three pillars to this with that aspect. Number one is the data itself. And this is really something I think a lot of people overlook, but does the data that you're using actually give a capability to be able to complete a search effectively? Now, one of the best ways that we can do this—and we can solve for this is—integrating with any ERP, PIM, line-of-business application. In most cases, our clients use our platform as a PIM, but really any application that we're going to pull in data from.  

The other thing is, how can we enrich that data? And this is an activity that a lot of companies and buying groups don't ever get to. They have great aspirations to enrich their data and make their meta-information more robust. It's a classic tale that we hear, but their business is, to some extent, so successful that it causes them to have a limiter, a throttle on their success because the foundational aspect of how they're marketing their business with these products and the product information. It has quality limits. So we really want to encourage you to look at that foundational element with the data.  

The second piece is the actual technology itself. Does the foundational technology that you're using allow you to do all the things that you need done? And then I would say the third piece is the actual user interface. How well does it allow the user to take advantage of that great data and that great capability? 

With those three things in mind, I would love it, Ron, if you wanted to just talk a little bit about any of those, but if you wanted to talk a little bit about that search capability as well. 

RON: I'll bring up some screenshots so we can actually really tie this in for you. So, as Chris was talking about the data, the thing that's so key here is, can your search engine be configured to include other elements of data? So, for example, within our eCommerce platform—and I'm going to bring this up on the screen here—we had a client that came in that said we have these strange SKUs, and you can see this one right here. It's called multi—I don't remember what it is, but when the screenshot pops up, you'll see it.  

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RON: And they said, “However, most people search for that by alternate customer numbers. And then there's even a Granger part number. So if I scroll down the screen here, you'll see what I did was, I went into the attributes and I was able to define additional attributes for the alternate. And you can see here I put three different customer alternate part numbers. I put that other part number, and then here's the Granger part number.  

So the great thing now, if I go back to the home page and I paste in the Granger part number and I search, up pops that unit, that's the first thing that pops up is the related search. So when Chris is saying, “70% of the people come in and they try to search for something and can't find it because it doesn't understand synonyms,” that's what we're talking about. I may not call it a hammer. I may call it a ball-peen hammer, but because it's an exact match. I tried to go and search for a claw hammer or a sledgehammer or something like that, and it didn't match. 

So even though we had them, because I didn't type in the name of the product exactly matching that, it doesn't show up on the group buying platform. So this could be competitive part numbers, OEM part numbers, synonyms like Chris calls it. I might call it a T-square where somebody else might call it something else. So you want to make sure that it can be configured, and we'll go into some of the other things in the next slide. We're actually going to go into some of the features and we'll show some more screenshots of how these features work. 

Getting the data, I think you're right on track with that, Chris, being able to get the data, serve up the data, and then, when they come in in search, being able to potentially track how they're searching so that you can figure out when they're not successful. Maybe somebody came in and searched for a widget and a lot of people refer to this item as a widget, but we don't. But if we can see that and see that they were unsuccessful, now we can go back in and add that synonym. So the next time somebody comes in search for widget, it pops up, right?  

How do we use this data and how do we use the results of our search to present better options to the buying group? How do we track and use that to improve our business? To help those people? As Chris said, if 70% of them are ready to buy, the hardest part is converting them, right? So if they come to the site, they do the search they're ready to buy. The last thing we want to do is mess that up.  

Continue to Part 2 to discover how power autocomplete can be.