Day 3 of Impact focused on the next steps of the relevance journey.

After a late night at the Big Bash, the Coveo Impact team is excited to end strong, powered by a few coffees and a nice breakfast. While the first two days of Impact provided a lot of the “big ideas” for the future, today’s sessions and keynotes were all about the immediate next steps to take when you get off your plane from San Francisco.

Poonam Johl of Coveo customer Motorola Solutions is looking forward to taking the learnings back to her colleagues in different groups that interact with customers. “I’m going to share with my manager and then our sales and marketing teams who are collecting customer data, to discuss how we can work together to share across the channels and enhance the customer experience.”

Ludwig Heil of Coveo customer Poly is thinking about how to extend the use of Coveo to other areas. “We’re trying to identify ways to use Coveo in our service products for things like self-healing, and integrate search with digital assistants like Alexa for support.”

Highlights from Day 3 of Impact

You can catch up on all of the day’s events on Twitter:

 

#1 We’re living in a new era. In the past, organizations could define the journey that customers and prospects take, carefully sculpting emails and offers to entice the next step toward purchase.

Mark Floisand, Coveo CMO, hosted a panel with senior marketers to discuss how this reality has changed. Customers are now in the drivers’ seat of their experience and the panel shared how as marketers we need to rethink our approach to customer experience, and how AI helps to automate at scale.

“Personas are only guideposts, they’re not an exact customer journey,” said Bit Rambusch, Vice President – eServices and Knowledge Management at Dell. “Similar to a self-driving car, when a deer steps in front of the car there isn’t time to take in data, post to a cloud and run it through an algorithm, that decision needs to be made at the point of need.”

Brad Smith, Founder/President of Vector Business Navigation spoke about the need to harness as many interactions around the customer lifecycle as possible. “There are huge amounts of value trapped in your company,” Brad said. “You have to use AI and ML to make sense of the chaos.”

Kimberly Ray, Senior Manager of Global Customer Experience at Teradata spoke to the culture shift happening at her company so teams think beyond the silos and consider the wider customer experience. “We empower our people to explore and innovate across the organization and think more holistically about the customer,” Kimberly said. “We work cross-functionally with sales, marketing, support, R&D and product management.”

We also introduced Coveo for Commerce. Dan Cornwell, Director, eCommerce and Digital Experience at Famous Footwear, a Caleres brand, shared his team’s journey to re-platforming on Sitecore Commerce, which is tightly integrated with Coveo Search.

“The website will go beyond processing transactions to developing relationships with customers, Dan said. “Coveo brings real-time personalization based on context and history and will recommend products to serve. That personalization at scale is incredibly important. We’ve completely changed how we operate our websites.”

#2 AI is the great enabler.

Businesses today feel the pressure to deliver a million interactions to a million users – without adding more and more budget. To achieve “relevance at scale,” AI and machine learning are the answer.

#3 Investing in your relevance journey is a challenge – but one that pays off.

Jen MacIntosh shared her own insights as Coveo officially relaunched its own community, Coveo Connect, powered by AI and ML to personalize your experience as a Coveo customer or partner.

“Support is a customer engagement strategy, not a case deflection tactic,” Jen said.

Coveo Connect does exactly that – connects the entire community of customers and partners, and does it seamlessly across the community and corporate website. The effort is key to a customer engagement strategy across the entire Coveo customer lifecycle.

Check it out!

….and that’s a wrap, folks! Well, not quite. Expect to see session and keynote content up on Coveo Academy soon, as well as a few recaps for the keynotes here on the blog.

In the meantime, we want to hear from you on Twitter (#CoveoImpact) – what sessions were most valuable for you? What was your favorite keynote? And finally, what insights are you taking home to share with your team?