Accenture's New Digital Platform Promises
To Change Website Experience For The User And The Brand
Two visitors, residing in different area codes in the same city, arrive separately at the URL of a fine spirits company for the first time. The first user, who entered the website by searching for a generic term for the beverage on Google, indicates at the “age gateway” to the distilling company’s site that he was born in 1986. The second, who had typed into the search engine the name of a spirit from a particular region, reveals that he was born in 1956.
The first user is immediately brought to a landing page where he is invited to a local tasting and shown bottles of spirits in order of price from lowest to highest. The second user, meanwhile, is taken to another page where he sees information on food pairings for different drinks and a product catalogue that displays more expensive items.
“The profile engine in this prototype determines who the users are, designing them a sophistication level between novice and expert, passes them to an optimization engine which returns some experience or treatment to the individual site and, based on what the user does with it (e.g. registers or buys spirits on line), makes a decision on whether it was a good experience for that particular user to reach the outcome he achieved,” said Joshua Kahn, a developer for Accenture Technology Labs, and among those responsible for what Accenture calls the Intelligent Digital Platform. “Essentially, what we’re doing is learning over time which particular combination of elements works best for a particular group of users. Users supply very little information, but the engine is making some pretty intelligent decisions.”
According to Kahn, dynamically changing the website gives visitors what they want to see, in a way they want to see it. “The optimization engine is doing an experiment in real time to determine the right version of the website for the user based on who he is,” Kahn said. “There are tools out there that do multi-variant testing [to see how users respond to different websites], which is what this is, but that’s typically more of a ‘go run an experiment and come back three weeks later and make changes on the site and start experimenting again,’ as opposed to using the results of the experiment in real time.”
In addition to providing a personal experience for the consumer, the Intelligent Digital Platform makes what’s happening on these personalized websites more transparent to the brand manager.
“Under normal circumstances, business people don’t have access to great data on who’s visiting the website,” said Kahn. “What we’ve done here in the case of the distilling company is offer three possible business outcomes – registrations, referrals [e.g. sharing an article with a friend] and brand engagement [looking at average time on the site and number of page views]. Brands that use the Intelligent Digital Platform are not necessarily limited to these outcomes – they can pick and choose what they want. It’s very flexible, and they can key in on different outcomes.”
For example, should the distiller on the demo wish to increase registrations, it can determine which of the possible different experiences or combinations resulted in the highest rate of registrations historically, and change page previews to target that particular outcome.
“It allows the marketer to get in there and control the purpose of the site for any given week, month, or quarter,” said Kahn. “Content and creative can be adjusted accordingly to allow for this. If the company then decides, for example, to shift from registrations to engagement rate, it would incorporate different variations to allow that to happen.”
Several major companies have shown interest in the demo, said Kahn, with the first Intelligent Digital Platform to be delivered for a client in February 2010. Testing has shown a marked improvement in the consumer experience with increasingly greater knowledge and insight shown over time by the technology as part of its performance optimization journey.
“It’s a synergy between what works best for the consumer and what the business is trying to accomplish online,” says Kahn. “It’s making use of technology that promises to change the very nature of how we interact online and the applications used by the web.”
Source: accenture
