Louis Tetu, Chairman, and CEO of Coveo kicked off Coveo Impact 2019, which is their annual conference. Louis started by claiming that being “digital” is not enough. Companies need to transform to be more Relevant. An irrelevant experience will cause people to look elsewhere, because 76% of consumers are willing to switch to a better experience. People born 
since 1995 are digital natives. There are 5 fundamental intents for digital: learn, buy, watch, fix or connect. Interactions are intent-rich moments and you only have a few seconds to engage in this world.
What is relevance? It’s in the eye of the beholder. That person has a context – where that person is at in the world and moment of time. That person also has an intent. Intent can be discovered by analyzing a person’s behavior. Coveo’s goal is to create relevant experiences for each customer.
Salesforce uses Coveo
Rosalind Litchfield, VP of Product Management at Salesforce spoke about relevancy and customer experience. We need the unification of data and experience to be relevant. Salesforce uses Coveo to bring relevance to their Service Cloud. The natural use case is to deflect call center calls by providing relevant information to customers who might otherwise call an agent. Salesforce is incorporating Coveo into their Chatbot experience. This way relevant content is displayed to users based on the contents of their chats. They also use Coveo as a search service to provide relevant results in a more general way to a variety of needs. Solution Finder is another areas where Salesforce has incorporated Coveo.
How is possible to create relevant experiences for 1 million users, where you end up with 1 million experiences? For Coveo, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are the keys to unlocking these experiences. The new normal is that segmentation is no longer enough. You have to move from Persona to actual Person. In Coveo, the AI can keep track of 1 million person contexts and infer intent to deliver 1 million relevant experiences.
The impact of data
Digital leaders don’t run with data, but run on data. This is why Amazon bought Whole Foods to get the data about your behavior. Once Amazon understands behaviors, they can use AI to make recommendations on a whole bunch of other goods and services.
IoT is also a big provider of data that can be used to infer intent and drive recommendations in other experiences.
F5 Networks
Peter Cook, VP of Digital Transformation at F5, spoke about digital and relevance transformation. F5 is all about the backend of the internet. We don’t see all their switches, routers, etc. but F5 is concerned with customer experience. They need to make sure it’s easy for customers to buy from F5. Next, they need to bring customer insights into the products and services they offers. Finally, they need to have the ability to scale and react to changing customer needs.
F5 uses Coveo to drive changes in their customer experiences to be more relevant. At the same time, the data provided by the Coveo platform provides insights into customer behavior. Identifying places where they can accelerate their digital transformation.
Coveo’s Focus
At Coveo, their mission has been to research relevance and understand how data science augments people to determine intents. Interactions are the means by which we express intent. Knowledge is the human ability to exercise judgment and take action. Cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge.
Coveo has built a cognitive model that starts with being responsive – delivering results and answers to searches or questions. After they understand intent, we can be proactive and then predictive. Here is a version of their model:
Coveo is emphasizing three areas through a combination of search and analytics:
- Commerce and Website Intelligence – tie relevancy to every interaction to drive conversions, agility, and tailor at scale.
- Service – tailor relevant and unified customer experience at every self-service or agent interaction and within products. This makes self-service effortless, meaningful and engaging.
- Workplace – empower employees with relevant knowledge every time in the course of work. This leads to proficiency and productivity for employees.
Coveo’s AI effort has been to learn from every interaction. To infer intent and preferences, integrate search and indexing and delivering unified relevance across every interaction and touchpoint.
