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CromaRetail.com, a subsidiary of Tata Sons, has tied up with MIT – backed Infinite Analytics, Inc. (IA) to provide personalized recommendations to its online users. IA’s personalization platform has allowed consumers to discover related and new products serendipitously, based on an understanding of the user, the product catalog and the contextual data.

THE CHALLENGE

“We were dealing with the problem of plenty. Because of our varied product offering, customers weren’t able to find what they needed and conversions suffered as a result.” - Ajit Joshi, CEO & MD, Infiniti Retail Ltd.

With that broad range of products and categories, the key challenge for Cromaretail.com was to help site users effectively and seamlessly navigate the store and discover what is most relevant to them. “We were dealing with the problem of plenty. Because of our varied product offering, customers weren’t able to find what they needed and conversions suffered as a result.” Croma explored many of the traditional recommendation companies in the space, but found them to be based on a history of customer clicks and purchase history. Another challenge was the large amount of new products that the store brought online.  “New products weren’t getting the proper attention unless we manually promoted them.” Traditional product recommendation relies on purchase history, which wasn’t available for a large portion of their product catalog. “We didn’t have 3 months to wait for a solution to begin working.”

THE SOLUTION

“When we started looking for a solution, we wanted to choose a partner that not only had cutting edge technology, but also could work with us to tailor the product to our needs. We chose Infinite Analytics.”  The company uses a multi-dimensional approach to personalization. One of the key benefits over other solutions is that implementation for Infinite Analytics customers has been anywhere from 4 hours to two weeks because it doesn’t rely solely on historical data.

“It is important to understand both the customer and the product catalog before you can hope to optimize each customer’s experience.  That’s what we do really well.”  – Akash Bhatia, CEO of Infinite Analytics

It all begins with understanding the customer.  By working with Croma to understand their unique data resources and combining that with other data, Infinite Analytics was able to empower the online retailer to understand a 360° view of the user.  Croma is now able to understand their social profile, brand affinity, recent activities, household and macroeconomic data about the customer.  “These are really powerful insights.” – Ajit Joshi, CEO & MD, Infiniti Retail Ltd.

For the product catalog, Infinite Analytics utilizes a patent-pending mix of NLP, Semantic technologies, Machine Learning and other 1st and 3rd party data to match and enrich the product understanding. It also can add micro-tagging, which allows products to be found more easily by search engines like Google.

The end solution allowed Croma to understand a customer’s intent in real-time, and to go beyond historical data to reveal the shoppers’ evolving tastes, preferences and affinities over time. The company avoids the “cold start” issue typically experienced with other product recommendation solutions – whether it be for a new user to the site or a new product.  This means Croma’s e-commerce team no longer needs to manually promote products as they are entered into the product catalog because of Infinite Analytics’ multi-dimensional approach to product recommendation.

THE RESULTS

“The results have been outstanding! Infinite Analytics has been consistently driving conversions and customer engagement. We are now looking to enhance the integration and personalization for our users.”

It’s been 6 months, and the Croma and Infinite Analytics partnership has shown immediate results:

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*For Post Diwali Period ending Nov 7, 2014

MOVING FORWARD

After 6 months of integration, Croma Retail and Infinite Analytics are continuing to work together on new and innovative ways to delight their customers with a personalized shopping experience. The fast growing e-commerce company continues to see great results, and the partnership is growing stronger with enhancements and new features to the implementation in the pipeline.

About Infiniti Retail Limited:                                                                                                                                                    

Croma is a chain of multi branded electronics retail stores in India. Croma is run by Infiniti Retail Limited, a 100% subsidiary of Tata Sons, a Tata Enterprise a globally recognized brand that stands for trust and reliability. Launched in October 2006, the chain now has 97 outlets across 16 major cities of India. Croma sells over 6000 products in the stores from 5 lead categories namely Home appliances, Entertainment, IT products, Digital imaging and Communication. Croma came in with a strong intent to help consumers in their buying process. This is aptly expressed in the brand’s tagline- “We help you buy”. The pillars on which this promise stands are Knowledgeable and helpful staff, wide range of brands and products, post-sale service assurance and International shopping experience.

Reiterating the same commitment to delight customers all along, Croma launched its own label products ‘Croma Life Accessories’ in 2008– with over 200 products in its portfolio that have a market share of over 25% in select categories like ACs, Small appliances and Accessories. ‘Croma Life Accessories’ has won the award for ‘Brand Excellence in Private Label’ for the 2nd consecutive year by the ‘World Brand Congress’ and is also the winner of the revered ‘Product of the Year’ award for its Portable AC.

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With its own eCommerce website, www.cromaretail.com, Croma is able to achieve online-offline synergies to bring great benefits to customers. Dedication and adherence to its brand promise has earned the company “Most Admired Retailer” – Consumer Electronics award for 6 years in a row from the Indian Retail Forum.

About Infinite Analytics:

Infinite Analytics (www.infiniteanalytics.com) is a Big Data and a Social Data Analytics company. Our flagship Personalization platform is the most advanced personalization platform for retailers and e-retailers. It creates a Genome of a user, based on the user’s structured and unstructured data on social networks, macroeconomic data, transactional data and other data sources, uses NLP, Machine Learning and a lot of predictive analytics to predict user behavior for e-commerce, retail, media and content, travel and enterprise businesses.
Infinite Analytics has a super team from MIT with over 60 years in e-commerce and technology, along with super advisors in Sir Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the World Wide Web and Deb Roy – Chief Media Scientist at Twitter.

The post Case Study: Croma Retail’s adoption of Infinite Analytics’ personalization platform effects a whopping 217% increase in conversions appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.