InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
August 9, 1999
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Teamwork Pays Off
BroadVision and Andromedia have also worked together for a number of mutual customers, says Eric Golin, BroadVision's chief technology officer and VP of product development. And BroadVision is working with several partners to integrate its Web products with relationship-management tools for other customer "touch points," such as call centers, telephone, and pagers. "Being able to cross over between applications--to go from a Web experience to a call-center experience seamlessly, for example--is something we're pursuing through partnerships," Golin says.
Technology is about to alter yet another centuries-old tradition: shopping for a wedding gown. Women planning to tie the knot can look for a dress in a virtual showroom at www.weddingnetwork.com, where they'll also find "virtual salespeople" who can help them. WeddingNetwork.com, owned and operated by Internet Gift Registries Inc. in Denver, is the largest and fastest-growing free online bridal registry. For now, only the wedding gown section of WeddingNetwork.com's registry, which offers more than 60,000 gift items and access to 750 retail storefronts, will be supported by Andromedia's LikeMinds Personalization Server software.
Rhiannon Jones, Internet Gift Registries' site producer, says the company chose the wedding-gown catalog as its first candidate for personalization because shoppers often find the catalog, which is housed in a conventional database, confusing. Designers use dozens of obscure terms--words that are foreign to most shoppers--to describe hems, necklines, and waistlines. Without some familiarity with this nomenclature, or with the designers themselves, maneuvering through the gown catalog wasn't easy.
LikeMinds is a collaborative filtering tool designed to make content personalization decisions and product recommendations on the fly. Collaborative filtering is a technology that grew out of artificial intelligence. By gathering information about a person--such as age, sex, hometown, preferences, and behaviors--collaborative filtering tools can identify similar people and suggest other items that might interest them. These predictions are the basis for specific product recommendations, for example, or for personalizing content.
Andromedia also offers Aria software, which gathers information about Web-site traffic and performs click-stream analysis in real time. "What we're trying to do in E-marketing is a four-step process: collect data, analyze data, act on data, and then measure, respond, and refine," says Steve Kanzler, Andromedia's VP of marketing.
Levi Strauss uses Andromedia's personalization software to power the Stylefinder application on its Web site. LikeMinds analyzes information shoppers provide about their tastes in fashion, music, sports, and other activities to predict which Levi Strauss style will suit them best. The company says Web-site visitors who use the StyleFinder personalization application view three to seven times more products and buy more products than those who shop without it.
Nearly three-quarters of customers who have used StyleFinder say the product recommendations were on target, and most return to the site two to five times more often than shoppers who didn't use the personalization tool. Levi Strauss' Knowles sums up the appeal of personalization: "When we can leverage our most valuable customers, it gets financially interesting for us."
Companies that sell content-management tools have come to American offering to make their products work directly with BroadVision's system. This would let content created with that vendor's tools automatically flow into the BroadVision infrastructure, Samuel says. But for now, he's working on content management in-house as he waits for BroadVision to integrate stronger capabilities with its system. "As a relatively large customer of BroadVision's, we're anxious to see that move along," Samuel says.
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Vendors are creating alliances to address the needs of companies. In June, BroadVision announced a partnership with OnDisplay Inc. that will help address American's concerns, according to a company spokesperson. OnDisplay markets applications to aggregate content and integrate it with legacy systems.
"Shoppers knew what they liked and didn't like, but they didn't know what to call it," Jones says. "Instead, we decided to set up a system allowing people to look at images of dresses and react to them. Based on these reactions, LikeMinds allows us to recommend other dresses that the shopper will probably like," Jones says. WeddingNetwork.com went live using LikeMinds in July.
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