Communicating with a personalized touch

KDDI’s au Online Shop conversion rate improved dramatically when they started using Acoustic Experience Analytics (Tealeaf). The results were “incredible,” says Nakayama. “Our team had developed a recommendation engine that could predict what phone model a user might be tempted by, based on their current model,” he continues. “We needed to find a solution to use this effectively online and Acoustic Personalization was the best fit for our needs. It’s an excellent product for both performance and cost efficiency. This was a major improvement, as we hadn’t been making full use of our recommendation engine up to that point.”

KDDI now uses four Acoustic products: Personalization, Content, Journey Analytics — a linked analytics service that enables you to track the customer journey — and Exchange, which links IDs to external services providers. This integration with Exchange is a significant differentiator for Acoustic over competitive solutions.

“The implementation process of Acoustic products wasn’t particularly prolonged,” says Soma. “Take Personalization — a product we’ve recently brought in. The whole process from vendor selection to website personalization took just four or five months. Most impressive was the recovery support we received when we encountered obstacles in implementing Personalization. The Acoustic team was very quick to find solutions to problems, working with their team in the U.S. and elsewhere on problems that couldn’t be resolved by the Japan team alone, which meant we were able to go live and start personalization on our online shop very quickly. This was a multi-company project involving Acoustic, IBM, and KDDI, but this partnership made for a smooth, reliable implementation overall.”

“What’s more, we’ve been able to show users optimized content without making any major alterations to the existing online shop infrastructure,” Soma continues. “The only modifications we made to the current operating system were to add a few scripts, which was a huge benefit in terms of both scheduling and cost.”

“Having compared multiple candidate vendors, Acoustic emerged as the overall winner. We went with Acoustic because their products are not only reasonably priced, but also superior to rival offerings in terms of both function and quality.”

Tsuyoshi Soma, Assistant Manager, Online Shop Promotion Office

Marketing Automation