Today, I’m super excited to announce the launch of the Relevance Cloud™– what we at RichRelevance believe to be the most comprehensive personalization solution for retail today. The Relevance Cloud is a re-imagining of all RichRelevance products with new features and more simple ways to access, use and implement each of RichRelevance’s products.
Our Discover, Engage, Recommend and Build products empower retailers to deliver and innovate brand-centric customer experiences that span the customer lifecycle across all channels. Each of these products is powered by the Personalization Graph—a unified customer view which aggregates key data on customer behavior, content, context and products. The Personalization Graph is the next generation customer view. Powered by Big Data technologies, it’s flexible, streaming and scalable. Unlike the rigid CRM-centric view of the customer, the Personalization Graph sees each consumer as a fluid, ever-changing and increasingly complex stream of events and touchpoints, reflecting the reality of today’s consumers.
Here are the parts of the Relevance Cloud:
Especially exciting to me is the debut of our Build API-based services (I am an engineer after all! ☺). The opening up of our SOA and platform are key to unlocking the next revolution in personalization. Personalization is not simply an application (e.g., the market-leading Recommend product recommendations) but a capability which must be deeply integrated into the fabric of every customer-facing moment, incorporating the essence of each retailer’s unique customer strategy. Data science as a skill set continues to mature within retailers, and with Build, we provide an open, flexible architecture for our retailers’ data science teams to create entirely new customer experiences.
Case in point: one of our long-time customers, Wine.com employed a “bring your own algorithm” approach to test and deploy a “similar products” recommendation strategy, incorporating their unique knowledge of their specific assortment. It ended up driving $5 per click—becoming one of their best strategies in terms of revenue per click and increasing overall orders and revenue, not to mention dazzling their customers by putting forward their industry specific expertise.
RichRelevance’s Relevance Cloud manages all the heavy lifting (fault-tolerant infrastructure, the operationalization of data, etc.) so that our customers can focus on what they do best: designing differentiated experiences that speak to shoppers 1:1, ensuring that personalization delivers a significant market advantage. I hope you are excited as I am about this next generation of personalization!
In relation to the VentureBeat article that was recently published, I am sharing a letter that I wrote to the BPPE department and the Lieutenant Governor’s office. Please feel free to copy this letter and send it on to the DCA.
To: Mrs. Denise Brown, Director of DCA
c/o: Reichel Everhart, Deputy Director of DCA
From: David Selinger, CEO, RichRelevance
CC: Lt. Governor, Gavin Newsom; Hackbright Academy; General Assembly
Mrs. Brown,
I had the great honor of meeting with Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom recently on the topics of technology, education and government. He left me optimistic that someone in the wonderful State of California understands the intent of government to support and protect its citizens, and the need to be progressive in a world where technology is wildly outpacing government.
The BPPE has taken aggressive measures today to remind me that the world of a backwards-looking, backwards-thinking California Government is not a thing of the past.
I could not be less pleased with the recent decision of the BPPE to extend its influence and power beyond that granted by it in its charter. This is the core problem of “bad government” – a counterproductive action taken when not required, definitely not valuable and potentially not even legal. General Assembly and Hackbright Academy (among other similar institutions being extorted) do not claim external accreditation. In fact, their very power and essence is the opposite of that which BPPE is designed to oversee and regulate: it is in the creation of value associated not with the outdated labels of accreditation, but with the merit of skills which are freestanding and which can be created, taught, measured and verified on a basis fully independent of the interjection of the state. Additionally, unlike a traditional vocational trade, there is no physical safety issue (beyond perhaps carpal tunnel syndrome) casting a shadow of “workplace safety risk management.”
It is clear that these organizations do not need, nor do the citizens of the State of California in any way benefit from the oversight of the BPPE—this is overhead, wasted tax dollars and regulation simply for the purpose of regulation and adding to the California State deficit. The economy of the future, the one which the State of California is frequently credited with designing and engineering, will be based on the true meritocratic measure of value. Where the value in a trade such as software development cannot be contained in a certification, accreditation or label; but will instead be self-evident in the capability to express creativity, create value, or engineer an experience—and to do so in an interview, on-the-job and in practice. I, like many of my contemporary CEOs and executives, care much more about the capacity of an individual than the capability of their parents to afford “higher education.”
I am honored to be the employer of a proud Hackbright graduate, Lydia. She is proud of her skills and has used her experience at Hackbright to accelerate her learning at RichRelevance, to make RichRelevance a better company and to improve the quality of our services to our customers. I did not hire her because of Hackbright per se. I hired her because upon leaving Hackbright, she could clearly demonstrate to myself and all of her co-workers that she knew her stuff, and her stuff was what we needed. I could personally care less if she had developed these capabilities from a book, an online course, or by dreaming between games of checkers at the park. It happens that Hackbright was the path through which she got here, and God bless them for being just that path.
In the meeting, the topic arose with the Lt. Governor on how we can might change things in the State of California for the better. I am a frustrated, disempowered citizen. The conversation was off-the-record so I won’t quote him, but I left the meeting with a strong sense and motivation to follow my moral compass, to take advantage of my role as a CEO/entrepreneur and to do what is right, because it is right, not because it is convenient. To sometimes choose the path of civil disobedience because it can be the path to truth.
What the BPPE is doing is wrong. It is wrong, distracting, counterproductive and unnecessarily expensive. I, as a taxpayer in the State of California, am making a stand and hereby demanding accountability from my government.
Mrs. Brown, please stop this madness immediately.
Write a formal apology, back down, and move forward successfully. No one will remember this happened in 48 hours thanks to Twitter and Justin Bieber. I promise. Do the right thing here.
We have people searching for work, people who can’t feed themselves or their families and foster children who desperately need our attention and love. The State of California needs leaders who are willing to forego the expansion of the power of their particular kingdom in order to attain the greater good of a powerful, economically viable State of California.
Respectfully submitted,
David Selinger
The BPPE (Bureau of Private Postsecondary Education) recently sent seven cease and desist letters to learn-to-code academies, including Hackbright Academy, Hack Reactor, App Academy, and others. These letters have threatened the organizations with fines and closure if they don’t comply with BPPE policies and oversight.
This controversy between the BPPE and the emerging category of crash courses in technology raises an important issue for California’s tech community. Do we allow our government to drive our businesses, or should the opposite be true? Can we reach a consensus and drive forward coordinated action? Alternatively, is consensus necessary? Or (true to form) do we debate this issue to death and yet do nothing, leaving us as disempowered as we started?
The Big Data revolution at Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple has transformed the consumer journey across channels, and even helped turn a presidential election. This transition simultaneously poses tremendous challenge and opportunity to retailers.
In our session “How Relevance Can Get Your Brand Elected” at last week’s NRF Big Show, Rayid Ghani (Obama for America’s Chief Scientist) and I shared how data scientists have utilized key methodologies for capturing value and turning Big Data to smart data—using it to win votes and create profit. The analogies between data usage in the Obama campaign and my experience at Amazon and RichRelevance are deep: there are three ways to use data in operations, and it is necessary to take small steps toward a very specific goal using an agile, fail-fast methodology.
The methodologies for data usage are analytics; prediction and interruption; and optimization. They transcend the emergence of “Big Data” and extend in their impact from the last century, as do the learnings from their failures. The “big transformative project” is doomed to fail; only iterative implementations see the huge ROI of data-oriented technologies.
As I traveled the exhibit hall, I reached my personal predictions for 2014:
- 2014 will test us: We must know our identity—who are we to our customers and how we maximize that. This challenge exists in a highly competitive and unfriendly ecosystem: Amazon is on a tear and will not stop; will Google, eBay, Apple and Facebook turn out to be friend or foe?
- Omni-channel ROI at scale: 2014 will be the first year with enough historical case studies of successful omni-channel strategies to support systemic investment. Retailers can invest in 5-10 major initiatives and each can build on the successes/failures of past years.
- Emergence of Big Data, Year 2 of 5: Big Data is a long-term trend. We are still in the early adopter phase, where practitioners familiar with the technology and business can be successful, but not enough business people fully understand the technology’s capabilities, ROI or risk in order for 2014 to be the year of mass scale. That said, Big Data is complex and will require numerous years of investment and learning to reach maturity. Executives know that, so this year will see significant investment from both capital and time budgets.
I invite you to learn more about how you can turn your Big Data into smart data for a relevant brand experience by visiting https://richrelevance.com/nrf/.
‘Tis the season that many retailers look to tactics and strategies to programmatically maximize their e-commerce conversion, and customer value pre-peak. These new innovations are critical for success, but always include a bit of risk. Are there any “tried-and-true” approaches we can confidently implement pre-peak with 100% certainty?
We’re happy to advise you on how best to implement key tools such as those RichRelevance offers and believe that this—paired with “Hill Climbing” will benefit you most. Hill Climbing maximizes your profits by optimizing assets you already have. We encourage you to “Hill Climb” hard for the next few weeks to leverage your existing strengths, insights, and capabilities.
Model yourself after the most successful Hill Climbing organizations (Amazon, eBay, Google) and listen to data, test ideas rigorously, and optimize constantly. Two key tenets of Hill Climbing are Metrics and Meritocracy—make consistent measurement of change easy, and combine this with agile change management. Combining these two engenders a culture motivated by positive results and empowered to make them happen one step at a time.
Thanks Giving.
I love today: The day before Thanksgiving.
Today we get the opportunity to think of everything for which to be thankful, and we have good reason to. In the retail world, we’ve just straight-up busted our tails the past months all in preparation for this Friday—ensuring everything is perfectly tuned, dialed and scaled to handle the consumer uproar which will be this weekend and the ensuing 15-20 days of craziness. Today is almost a combination of a final sprint with a huge breath out at the end of the day. “Whew—thank goodness for our amazing IT team. Let’s let ‘er roll!”
[ As an aside, top search terms for this season so far? —Tablets Rule! #1 may be TVs, but both #2 and #3 are for tablets: ipad, and tablet]