Article

Emil Eifrem
Emil Eifrem 13 June 2019

The Future of Digital Retail: Interconnected Customer Data

Graph database pioneer Emil Eifrem explains why firms needs to embrace highly-personalised, data-driven digital brand experiences

Retailers are continually looking to help shoppers search for items that perfectly fit their needs. The problem 99% of the market now faces: doing it in a way that rivals the world’s biggest virtual store, Amazon.

Amazon has taught us the monetary value of being able to predict what else customers might want to buy, by analysing online sales data. It’s a lesson that any brand wishing to survive needs to learn, and apply, so as to provide consumers with intelligent, highly context-sensitive prompts.

Such hyper-personal recommendations can only be generated with the assistance of technology, as that’s the only way to embed more intelligence into a recommendation engine. eBay App for Google Assistant is a great example of just such AI powered recommendation technology. And it’s a prime example of the type of graph-powered hyper personalisation that brands need to offer.

The power of spotting connections

The system, which runs off voice commands on Google Assistant, works by asking qualifying questions so it can quickly serve up relevant product examples to choose from. Under the hood, accomplishing this requires a combination of NL (Natural Language) processing, ML (Machine Learning), accurate predictive analytics, a distributed, real-time storage and processing engine, underpinned by a graph database to make all the real-time data connections required.

The  eBay App for Google Assistant,is a chatbot powered by knowledge graphs that supports conversational commerce – and is designed to provide a seamless, personalised shopping experience, enabling you to check out the prices of products you request and find the best deal, simply by asking. And as eBay’s Chief Product Officer has publicly stated, existing product searches and recommendation engines were unable to provide or infer the right contextual information within a shopping request, prompting his team to develop a bridge between regular search and natural language search using a graph database to process all the real-time data connections required.

Another example is London-based augmented reality e-marketing agency Quander. It’s all about mining users’ physical presence and movements in video and augmented reality experiences to offer more personalised ‘experiences' and better recommendations and get a deeper understanding of how customers interact with a brand. Again, the firm is using a graph platform for clients’ data collection to do everything from track how many times an event was visited, how many social media messages were opened, in order to identify deep patterns and analyse them to predict real-life outcomes. Finally, the data is used to make recommendations in context so tracking and curating individual experiences.

Graphs can help fend off the Amazon threat

Why do both of these hyper personalised recommendations systems use graph technology? Because it’s perfect for helping refine a search against inventory with context – a way of representing connections inside your data sources, based on shopper intent, while preserving the paths that they are likely to take. This allows the system to build up its internal profile of the customer and working with that portrait is the main way of generating its hyper-personal and relevant suggestions.

I predict we’ll see a lot more of these tech-boosted recommendations coming as brands have huge volumes of data, but are struggling to find the best way to use it to help their customers. If you are going to succeed in personalisation, you have to be able to leverage data connections and join the dots between the relationships – so why not look to graph technology to give you the full picture?

The author is CEO of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, Neo4j

Please login or register to add a comment.

Contribute Now!

Loving our articles? Do you have an insightful post that you want to shout about? Well, you've come to the right place! We are always looking for fresh Doughnuts to be a part of our community.

Popular Articles

See all
How to Review a Website — A Guide for Beginners

How to Review a Website — A Guide for Beginners

A company website is crucial for any business's digital marketing strategy. To keep up with the changing trends and customer buying behaviors, it's important to review and make necessary changes regularly...

Digital Doughnut Contributor
Digital Doughnut Contributor 25 March 2024
Read more
The Impact of New Technology on Marketing

The Impact of New Technology on Marketing

Technology has impacted every part of our lives. From household chores to business disciplines and etiquette, there's a gadget or app for it. Marketing has changed dramatically over the years, but what is the...

Alex Lysak
Alex Lysak 3 April 2024
Read more
The World Is Shrinking: 6 Degrees of Separation Is Now 2!

The World Is Shrinking: 6 Degrees of Separation Is Now 2!

Six degrees of separation is not just a party game, it's a reality. Everyone is the world is interconnected, and thanks to social media, that connectedness gets tighter and richer each day. See the research...

Scott Christley
Scott Christley 9 August 2017
Read more
10 Factors that Influence Customer Buying Behaviour Online

10 Factors that Influence Customer Buying Behaviour Online

Now is an era where customers take the center stags influencing business strategies across industries. No business can afford to overlook factors that could either break the customer experience or even pose a risk of...

Edward Roesch
Edward Roesch 4 June 2018
Read more
Cats and Dogs Boost Your Business By 300%. Here’s How.

Cats and Dogs Boost Your Business By 300%. Here’s How.

It’s the age-old question that has endured ever since the creation of the internet: are you a cat person or a dog person? Or do you love both cats and dogs? We have both dog lovers and cat lovers at Sortlist, so it...

Aline Strouvens
Aline Strouvens 27 August 2021
Read more