Introduction to Additional Personalization Approaches Inside and Outside of SAP Commerce Cloud
To get a more rounded view of the available personalization possibilities, we'll have a brief look at areas that aren't controlled or even touched by web content managers like Laura:
- Enhanced segment management using custom code inside SAP Commerce Cloud.
- SAP Engagement Cloud for segment management outside of SAP Commerce Cloud.
- Intelligent Selling Services for SAP Commerce Cloud (ISS) for external product recommendations, directly exposed in the storefront.
Let’s explore all three options a bit further.
1. Custom Code for Enhanced Segmentation
Laura uses segments to define a target group within a customization. She typically doesn’t know which individual customer is currently assigned to a segment, nor the strength of this association – the affinity.
Instead of using Backoffice to define these associations manually, software developers can automate this process using custom code.
The good news: Laura’s daily tasks of defining and using customizations remain untouched.
2. SAP Engagement Cloud for Segment Management Outside of SAP Commerce Cloud
Instead of using developers to manage segments and their customers’ associations, it is also possible to use the optional integration with SAP Engagement Cloud. This integrates another powerful SAP solution optimized for sales purposes, such as campaigns and personalization. When integrated, SAP Commerce Cloud sends all storefront user activities to SAP Engagement Cloud. This clickstream includes executed searches, visited Product Detail Pages, current and recent orders, and products added to the cart, for example.
Based on that input, SAP Engagement Cloud now dynamically handles the "user to segment association" and the corresponding affinities, ranging from weak to strong. Then SAP Engagement Cloud frequently sends the information back to SAP Commerce Cloud.
There's more good news: Laura's daily tasks of defining and using customizations remain untouched.
3. Intelligent Selling Services for SAP Commerce Cloud for AI Powered Product Recommendations
It's important to make sure products presented to customers on the storefront are products the customer is interested in. This kind of merchandizing is very time consuming when done by hand, or even impossible. With the power of AI, the task becomes a lot easier.
Intelligent Selling Services for SAP Commerce Cloud, or ISS for short, extends the functionality of SAP Commerce Cloud (licensing terms apply). As previously described for SAP Engagement Cloud, all customer activities, the "click-streams", are also sent to ISS and processed there. ISS uses AI capabilities to present interesting products to customers, via product carousels. These carousels are populated based on user behavior, site-wide metrics like trends, and configurable business metrics like margins.
Laura's colleagues from Merchandizing and Sales are responsible for tuning these carousel metrics to decide which product mix will be displayed. There are several product mix types available. Each one is generated using different inputs for different purposes, such as trending, recently viewed, complementary, or related products.
The following video gives an introduction of creating a product mix in ISS. Don’t worry, this is just informational content and not relevant for the certification, nevertheless it's instructive to understand the scope of ISS.
The good news: Laura’s task is to add carousels with suggested products from ISS to the best-matching locations on the storefront.
Laura handles ISS product mix carousels like "regular" components. They display personalized content without the need to create a customization in SmartEdit. ISS provides the information in the carousels directly to the storefront. Therefore, ISS usually accompanies the previously mentioned personalization approaches instead of replacing them.
The following video shows how a product carousel of the most popular products, previously generated by ISS, is now customized and added to the home page by Laura using SmartEdit: