2015 was an extremely exciting year in many ways. We started focusing on creating more relevant recommendation algorithms, and were actually hoping to partner up or even merge with such a provider. But the reality was a bit different from our vision, due to egos. Data management was at stake, so in the end everything fell apart, and we decided to develop our own solutions.
While doing research, we needed as much data as possible about product prices, availability, visualisations, or all the details about orders. The goal was to create a tool that could be used when communicating between loyalty programmes. In other words, the collected data had to be 100% accurate from a purchasing perspective. The result of these implementations doubled the number of servers that we needed.
All these steps are still helping us today to better understand the user behaviour. It was also at that time that we realised that the general product recommendation algorithms were fine, but there were plenty of other opportunities that could be used when customising product recommendations. But they require personalised algorithms, meaning more data that basically help you guess information about users: gender, age, family situation, and so on.
In 2015, most customers were able to understand that automation was extremely important and that it could yield immediate results. We deployed the largest number of automation programmes in absolutely all areas (B2B or B2C) and also this was the year when we completed our integrations with most CRM applications. We automate processes related to the contractual relationship, offline interactions or e-commerce interactions.
We are getting closer to the present. The story of 2016 in the next article!
