I’ve just returned from eTail 2007. I was a moderator at Search Day and really enjoyed the experience. David Patterson from Edwin Watts helped me out and was full of enthusiasm and energy for internet retailing – as he always is.
At the end of Search Day each moderator had the opportunity to tell the audience what they had learned. We had been discussing site search and had seen that there are still many retailers that have very basic home grown solutions. In all of these cases they knew that they needed something better. We also heard from a number of larger retailers who where utilizing Endeca and weren’t happy with it. However they had invested significant time and money integrating it with their site – so the pain of changing to something better was significant. We discussed how SLI’s managed site search service Learning Search was able to be implemented in weeks not months and moved much of the ongoing pain away from their internal staff.
We also enjoyed listening to the retailers discuss their experiences about what worked and didn’t work. They were happy to share, with non-competing retailers, the lessons they had learned. These interactions are often key to the future success of the companies they were talking about. For us this emphasized the value of ensuring our existing customers are happy. While you can’t please all the people all the time, I think we do a fantastic job and it is paying dividends.
I’d like to publicly thank David Patterson for his time and effort here, and the whole team at SLI for working so hard to keep our customers happy.
