Sitecore Discover, formerly Reflektion, is a customer centric personalization platform that optimizes customer experiences on an individual basis in real time.
Reflektion is very well suited for ecommerce sites that are looking to provide their customers meaningful product recommendations tailored to their specific user experience on our site. We are also beginning to use Reflektion for search results. If you find that your customer base uses your search bar or is having issues with their search experience, Reflektion offers a great auto complete search results feature. We have a sister site that only offers a small catalog of products and we do no use the auto search results feature on this site. If your company has a small catalog the search results tool may not be as effective. I cannot think of a scenario in which an ecommerce site would not find it helpful to provide customized product recommendations to their customers.
3 Scenarios where Sitecore Experience Platform is well suited: 1. Customized AI/ML Model development - Developing and deploying ML/AI models to automate tasks related to the process. e.g., image classification, sentiment analysis or text classification, etc.2. RPA & Chatbots - RPA scripts to automate simpler tasks and integrate with legacy systems (UI path, opensource RPA scripts). Implementation of chatbots training by human agents to respond to redundant queries 3. Data Enrichment - Structuring and enriching data using automated techniques in ML as well as human agent labeling
Reflektion provides individualized results based off each customer's unique browse experience on the site. This is beneficial because it gets more accurate results than segmenting customers by certain behaviors consistent with other customers.
Reflektion is responsive to our business. They treat each request with professionalism and work to find solutions quickly.
Reflektion has several beneficial features to further enhance the customer experience through a learning environment. Reflektion learns synonyms and is able to adjust for more accurate results. They also provide full page results with faceted navigation which leverages the individualized learning into the product results specific for each customer in a seamless integration with the site.
Sitecore has a decent supply of out of the box components and capabilities that can be fairly easily styled to meet business needs without much customization needed. This often helps speed to market.
Sitecore has had the flexibility of offering on-premise hosting or cloud hosting to meet different needs of clients, though recently they have strongly pushed their cloud-based hosting. This is in alignment with the industry and very helpful for organizations that aren't looking to add another product to the portfolio of packages that their internal IT teams need to manage
Sitecore has a capable UI for editing content. Though some competition may do better in this regard, Sitecore's editing interface is fully capable.
While I mentioned that training our team in using the Reflektion dashboard was quite pain free, the dashboard can get a little overwhelming to a first time user. There are a lot of options and customization features available that can be intimidating at first.
There isn't really too much for us to criticize with Reflektion. As I said, we switched from another product to Reflektion and so far have had almost no issues. When they do come up, the Reflektion team has been very helpful.
While the UI is capable, some other products in this space have a much more intuitive editing interface. Sitecore could do better in providing an easy to use editing UI.
It would be nice to see a fully managed Sitecore instead of just cloud hosted
The price falls more to the premium side of things. Making the value proposition a bit harder to justify
Implemented for various projects such as:›Market and sales intelligence Competitor tracking Management moves Social media tracking Customized information sourcing. Use web-scraping and parsing for data harvesting where the search is keyword-based and, the content and data extractions are required from various websites•Implemented for diverse requirements:›Social media tracking›Image recognition›Pricing comparison›Competitor content mapping›e-Commerce products’ cataloging, etc.
1. Customized software development & maintenance. 2. Technology Consulting - Consulting-based services for technology solutions data engineering or cloud solutions. 3. Used for tapping into multiple data sources such as CRM and marketing automation systems and, creating automated data extracts with a high-end visual representation of data. 4. Implemented for scheduling an existing report to automatically refresh and be delivered to specific users at a specific regular interval.
Reflektion is a very cost-effective, complete solution providing individualization for preview search, product recommendations, full page search, and content. Compared to the other services they offered more features utilizing SOLR results but with continued learning. Other services didn't have the full list of capabilities or were much more expensive.
All of these platforms have their pros and cons. Selecting the best fit is a matter aligning corporate need vs features provided. Have a .NET shop with an advanced marketing team looking to push UX forward and willing to pay a premium, then Sitecore may be the right fit. Have an organization centered around Java and only looking for basic CMS capabilities or looking for a budget-friendly option, then there may be better options beyond Sitecore.
Increasing conversion rate is almost always the goal when we start a new project and it is safe to say that Reflektion has helped us increase conversion rate for customers clicking through product recommendations.
With our previous recommendations engine, tweaking and customizing the recommendations on our site was not nearly as effective or easy as it is with Reflektion. This has saved us countless hours in dev and manual operations work.
We have not seen any negative impacts of Reflektion and hope this continues.
For mature marketing organizations, the analytics that Sitecore allows you to capture have been valuable in pushing forward marketing objectives and giving insight into how to tailor content for the best UX
