X-SellAnalyst

Maximize your cross-sell opportunities with intelligent recommendations

This is the moment of truth for every retailer: a customer is making a purchase. Is it time to send the order to your fulfillment channel? Not quite yet. In fact this might be one of the best moments to interact with your customer one more time. Imagine that you had an ability to intelligently recommend what other items might be of interest to the customer. Then you could both improve customer satisfaction and increase the value of this interaction to the company - if the customer feels that your recommendation is correct and decides to purchase the recommended item.

Every customer interaction is an opportunity to sell more. Selling to existing customers is less costly than acquiring new customers. Offering product or services that fit the needs of individual customer builds customer loyalty. Sophisticated customers expect personal relevant information. Megaputer's X-SellAnalyst empowers you to recommend new products in real time to customers. This includes new customers, which allows you to maximize every interaction that a customer has with your sales force.

X-SellAnalyst for Online Retailers

"If I have 3 million customers on the Web, I should have 3 million stores on the Web."
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com

On-line retailers can now increase the size of a customer's basket by leveraging on cross-sell opportunities that occur at different stages of a customer's interaction with the website. Current IT systems incorporate a number of business rules and customer information to arrive at a recommendation. A major challenge here would be an inability to manage recommendation systems geared towards one-time visitors. In today's competitive world where customers have a high propensity to switch, it is imperative that retailers try to maintain visitors' interest with relevant and useful information.

Unlike rules based system that are not easily scalable in today's retail environment, X-SellAnalyst provides a unique oportunity to learn from historical transactions and provide online real time recommendations system.

X-SellAnalyst for In-Store Retailers

Selling to existing customers is less costly than acquiring new customers. Offering products or services that fit the needs of individual customer builds customer loyalty. Sophisticated customers expect personal relevant information. Megaputer's X-SellAnalyst empowers you to intelligently recommend new products in real time to both existing and new customers. The ability to recommend products to even new customers allows you to maximize on every interaction that a customer has with your sales reps.

• Learn typical purchasing patterns based on the analysis of historical transactions
• Make suitable purchase recommendations in response to any purchase
• Provide purchase recommendations fast - at the point of sale
• Takes into account the probability of purchase, as well as margins for individual products
• Readily process huge volumes of data
• Work with data in any relational database
• Seamlessly integrate intelligent recommendations into your existing sales system

X-SellAnalyst provides retailers a unique advantage of being able to create 'coupon recommendations' in real time. The ability to provide such a system without a need to collect customer's information can provide a unique opportunity to increase cross sell revenues for existing as well as NEW customers.

Currently the retailer faces the following operational challenges to implement a personalized - real time coupon delivery system.

1. Product proliferation - The increasing number of product makes, types and sizes has resulted in a huge number of store SKUs. Even with current IT systems, this results in a unmanageable number of business rules and high costs associated with updating rules.
2. Customer information - The increased costs associated with managing customer's information, preferences and privacy related issues creates a high ROI barrier for implementing systems based on customer surveys / feedbacks.
3. Sales clerk/ Cashier training - The check out counter is the only personal interchange between a store and its customer. The increased use of semi-skilled, migrating labor to perform this critical task makes implementing a personalized coupon delivery system ineffective.

The right questions to ask when selecting recommendation system

• Can the system make recommendations in "internet time"?
• Can the system take into account the profitability and recency of purchase when making recommendations?
• Does the system make recommendations based only on the last transaction, or it can take into account the entire history of recent transactions?
• Can the system scale to your growing needs?

Increasing the value of EVERY customer interaction

Potential customer: "If I have not applied for your new credit card the first couple of times I saw an ad, what makes you think I'm going to after I see the same ad fifteen times?"

X-SellAnalyst for Call Centers

Call center operators are in a unique position to recommend new products to a customer and increase his basket size. However, with number SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) increasing rapidly, it is virtually impossible for an operator to manually and consistently deliver recommendations. It is essential to arm sales personnel with effective real-time tools assisting them in selling more items from their extensive inventory. The simple and modular architecture enables users to quickly interface it with existing call center automation systems thus enabling a quick ROI.

With X-SellAnalyst, the operators can instantly view personalized recommendations for every customer they talk to based on historic and current transactions.

X-SellAnalyst can turn customer interactions into repeated revenue generating opportunities and drive loyalty, increase retention and improve profitability in the long run.

Benefits of X-SellAnalyst

• Packaged as a COM module – can be easily integrated into your current CRM system
• Identifies the best cross-sell opportunities on-the-fly
• Very fast response time (<1 sec for 100,000 products)
• Scales very well for processing large volumes of data
• Works with any relational database
• Takes into account the probability of purchase, as well as margins for individual products
• Supports Windows NT 3.51/4.0, 98/ME/2000/XP

The Technology behind XSellAnalyst

X-SellAnalyst trains itself on available transactional data and develops and stores a recommendation filter that can be used for quickly calculating the most attractive cross-sell opportunities. Once trained, X-SellAnalyst can serve as an intelligent adviser for your sales specialist or an automated agent powering your e-Commerce website. It becomes an expert system that helps driving your customer interactions.

Often you would like to recommend not only the products, which have the best chance to be purchased, but also your higher margin and volume products that are likely to be purchased. X-SellAnalyst attempts to maximize your overall potential profit when recommending additional products to customers. You can modify margins for individual products in your database, and X-SellAnalyst takes these extra conditions into account automatically when making new recommendations.

X-SellAnalyst is extremely scalable: it can train quickly on data involving dozens of thousands of products and millions of customers and transactions. X-SellAnalyst can be easily incorporated in any external system: it is packaged as a COM component with a set of well-documented interfaces and properties.

One of the nice features of X-SellAnalyst is its amazing scalability: the calculation time does not increase with a growing number of customers, increases only linearly with the number of already purchased products (usually, there are just a couple of them), and increases between Log(N) and N (for large N), where N - the total number of available products. For 100,000 products, the recommendation time is a fraction of a second.

Resources
	X-SellAnalyst Brochure
	Case Study: Increasing Online Sales for IHS

"The Document Suggestion Search System provides purchase recommendations for customers at the IHS e-commerce site. IHS expects the system to pay for itself many times over in the next two years." - Jaren Green, IHS

See it in action using the IHS Online Retail System. Just select a product and view additional recommendations made by X-SellAnalyst