Beauty site gets personal with Oracle, WebSphere, E.piphany
Reflect.com bills itself as the Internet's first interactive customized beauty products retailer, and has built its customer service system on what executive Hannelore Schmidt calls "Nordstrom's model of customer service, which is based on the theory of surprise and delight." Schmidt's title is, in fact, director of consumer delight and loyalty, which indicates how important customer service is to the company.
< span="">> |
According to Jonathan Grayson, Reflect.com's vice president of engineering, newsletters used to be generated based on six or seven segmentations of the information. But the company realized that even that approach needed fine-tuning. "We wanted to be able to make the relationship between Reflect.com and the customer a relationship between two individuals," he says. "So, in addition to better segmented e-mail marketing, we needed real-time personalization of the Web site."
For instance, if a customer from New York visited the site just before a heat wave, he wanted her to be informed of the imminent heat wave and a hair-care product that would keep her hair type from frizzing, drooping, or whatever else humidity might do to cause her to have a bad hair day.
With visitor numbers soaring--the site had 650,000 unique visitors in June--Grayson and Matt Doyel, Reflect.com's director of customer focus, knew they needed to expand their system technically so the marketing team could keep up with the traffic. According to Grayson, the question was how to get a larger quantity of better-targeted programs in front of the customer. The trick was doing so in such a way that the technologists could be left to focus on technology development, while the marketing experts could focus on marketing--without asking for assistance from the technology team every time they wanted to re-segment their customer data.
Detailed discussions led to the conclusion that Reflect.com needed a completely integrated tool that offered the marketing team a 360-degree view of the customer in three vital areas: analysis, campaign management, and real-time personalization of the Web experience.
The company turned to E.piphany E.5 software, but rather than maintain the software itself, the company hired Interelate, an Eden Prairie, Minn.-based hosted CRM solutions provider, to host the application for a fixed monthly fee. Reflect.com provides Interelate a duplicate of its Oracle 8i database. Interelate uses its own Sun Enterprise 450 server and iPlanet Web server to generate personalized e-mail, analyze visitor information, and create custom Web pages on the fly. (See complete product index.)
Maintaining a copy of the database for production applications and transactions at its own site allows Reflect.com immediate and unimpeded access to information it needs to create customized products without worrying that an inadvertent change might adversely affect the work of the marketing department.
Reflect.com's database interacts with several arms of the business. Sitting on a Sun Enterprise 420 server running an iPlanet Web server, an IBM WebSphere transaction server handles the e-commerce transactions that allow the business to process and acknowledge orders from the Web site. At the same time, a Macromedia Jrun run-time engine runs the specialized Java application that Grayson and Doyel wrote to handle Web site page creation. A neural network expert system also resides on the Sun 420, where it builds the components of the customized products, and interfaces with the WebSphere server to execute the transactions.
"Our ability to create real-time personalization is extended by the analytical tools E.piphany provides," Grayson says. "The marketing group is now able to act on information as they need it, without involving the engineering staff."
Lisa Napell Dicksteen is president of LMN Editorial, which handles writing and editing as well as marketing and public relations consulting.