It’s impossible to say exactly how many SaaS apps are currently on the market, but it is a lot. CloudLock, a division of Cisco, recently conducted an analysis and found a staggering number—more than 150,000 unique applications—in use across a sample of 750 companies.
Thankfully, buyers usually don’t have to wade through tens of thousands of apps to find what they’re looking for; software is targeted at particular verticals and customer segments. However, even when applications are divided into various categories, buyers still face an overwhelming amount of choice. As the Harvard Business Review puts it, software buyers are “deeply uncertain and stressed… [they] are increasingly overwhelmed and often more paralyzed than empowered.”
This is, of course, where Coveo comes in.
Coveo uses AI and intelligent search technologies to personalize digital commerce experiences and deliver relevant product recommendations. Coveo solutions are particularly important in today’s digital economy, where relevant recommendations are among the most powerful tools companies have to drive sales. According to one study, recommendations can drive almost a quarter of both orders and revenue for the companies that use them.
These numbers are impressive, but there’s a way to unlock even more value from recommendations: Unifying browsing and purchasing activity across every channel and product with a single platform. Recommendations are more effective if the data they rely on is not siloed and can inform interactions at every customer touchpoint.
The need for a unified commerce platform is greater now than ever before. AppDirect recently conducted a survey that found 49 percent of companies are encountering an increase in IT complexity as they try to streamline their digital commerce operations. Moreover, only 29 percent of applications are integrated across a typical company, increasing the risk that data will become siloed. How can these problems be avoided?
This is where AppDirect comes in.
AppDirect is an end-to-end subscription commerce platform for selling, distributing, and managing cloud-based products and services. Last month, we announced a partnership with Coveo to make Coveo AI available in our subscription commerce technology. “The customer experience is among the most important differentiators in the digital economy,” said Dan Saks, our co-founder and co-CEO. “We are very excited to work with Coveo to bring the best to our customers and help them achieve even higher conversion rates by recommending the most relevant products to each and every buyer in their marketplaces.”
We believe AppDirect’s unified commerce experience and Coveo’s industry-leading recommendations can offer a best-in-class experience for both customers and end-user digital buyers alike. When it comes to strategy and implementation, however, companies shouldn’t have to go it alone. We partner with some of the world’s leading system integrators that can not only help you integrate Coveo, but also provide a complete commerce strategy by partnering with AppDirect. You can learn more about our partner program here.
Louis Tetu, Chairman and CEO of Coveo, recently said: “Enterprise marketplaces must deliver the personalized digital experiences and recommendations that shoppers have come to expect from leading online brands, or they will simply go elsewhere. Only AI can deliver a million experiences to a million people.” We could not agree more, and we are excited to work with Coveo to make those customer experiences as seamless as possible.