I guessed I might be in for some fun when I arranged an interview to learn more about Zoovu’s discovery platform, supercharging the SAP Customer Experience portfolio, just because of the inventive company name.
But the fun of my conversation with Lamees Butt, SVP Global Alliances & Channels at Zoovu, was more about the sheer inventiveness of the offering itself than the name. You know how everybody loves to tell you about their “revolutionary” new products? Well, Butt quickly convinced me that the Zoovu app, one of the hottest sellers on SAP Store, really is. As for the name – I’ll get to that later.
Transforming Discovery
Product discovery: that’s what Zoovu is revolutionizing. While online search does keep improving, the truth is that you still have to know what you’re looking for. Zoovu “humanizes” product discovery, Butt told me, making products easier to find, evaluate, and buy by bringing context to your search.
“Most e-commerce sites are not much more than indexes or digital catalogs,” she commented, “not well organized or structured. Say you need a new laptop and go online to do some research. Where do you start? You’ll probably be asked to specify, for instance, how much RAM you need, how much CPU. What does that mean?” She added a shocking statistic: 80% of organizations believe they are offering a good user experience. Only 8% of buyers agree.
Imagine instead being guided through the process with relevant questions and interactive buying advice. With Zoovu integrated into your commerce experience, Butt explained, you are asked the questions the knowledgeable sales assistant would pose in-store. For example, what do you typically do with your laptop? Say you run a lot of spreadsheets, meet colleagues virtually online, travel on business, design flyers for community events, and construct crossword puzzles. Voilà! With five questions, the digital assistant translates your needs and recommends you a laptop. Essentially, it uses artificial intelligence (AI) and semantics to personalize your search.
That’s a simple example for a B2C use case. Now imagine a complex purchase for a B2B buyer – a hospital upgrading X-ray equipment, for example, or a contractor building aircraft components. “It’s so easy to make a mistake in specifications or choose the wrong product,” Butt said, “and there typically are no tools on commerce for cross-checking product compliance. With our solution, by connecting the back-office product content and exposing it to the front-office commerce experience, there is zero error.”
Converting Prospects
Since SAP Store is such a valuable resource for SAP account executives, who can learn about and recommend partner offerings, I broached concern about the Zoovu Conversational Assistants for SAP Commerce & Sales Cloud app eliminating sales people’s jobs. On the contrary, she replied, it can serve as an assistant for them, too. Customers can get answers to simpler questions on their own and free up the experts for transactions that require their know-how. Account executives can work with customers to better understand what they need and adapt their sales approach in real time – and dramatically improve conversion rates. Another Zoovu app on SAP Store, Visual Product and System Configuration (No-Code), enables your end customer to virtually set, build, bundle, and configure complex products online while reducing manual intervention.
Innovating Through Integration
The Zoovu discovery experiences are integrated with SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP CPQ to work securely with any IT landscape. The Zoovu platform enriches product content automatically with industry-specific taxonomies and work across all industries. “The qualifying questions,” Butt remarked, “are gold dust for companies that are building complex mechanics for their customers.” Because of that tight integration, the apps scale across channels and regions and can easily be embedded at distribution partners via web, chat, and in-store kiosks.
I was intrigued about Butt’s role, since she is such an enthusiastic evangelist. She’s been a member of the Zoovu team as one of the first employees, coming in with a background in the digital transformation space. She noted that the company expanded quickly after it was established in 2017 by several young computer scientists, who surrounded themselves with smart people from diverse fields with different skill sets. Her responsibility is to help the company scale through partnerships, and SAP is an ideal match, she observed, because of the product-customer fit. Let me add that she is 100% correct in that respect. The Zoovu apps set a record on SAP Store with the speed of uptake from our customers.
It seems that an intern came up with “Zoovu” in the process of building a product subset, and it caught on. That intern, Butt added, is now part of the Zoovu leadership team.
Is your organization ready for a revolution in product discovery? Why not find out how on SAP Store?
Rajiv Nema is part of Marketplace Group for Digital Experiences at SAP.