Searchspring hosted a brief product webinar to discuss the updates we’ve made to our spell correction feature.
On March 28th at 4:30 pm EST/1:30 pm PST, Searchspring hosted a brief product webinar to discuss the updates we’ve made to our spell correction feature.
With this update, shoppers will receive more accurate search suggestions because Integrated Spell Correction references the product catalog.
Integrated Spell Correction is just another way that Searchspring helps its vendors guide shoppers to the product they desire.
Here are a few points that were covered in the webinar:
How does Integrated Spell Correction work?
How does this update benefit Searchspring customers?
When will this update be put into effect and how do I prepare for it?
Ready to learn more? Watch it now!
0:03
Welcome to today’s Webinar. Everyone.
0:05
Today, we are going to introduce the new Searchspring feature, integrated spell correction.
0:14
So, thanks for joining us today.
0:17
My name is Jason Ferrara, I am Chief Marketing Officer at Searchspring, and I am your host for and moderator for this, for this webinar. Thank you for everybody who’s on the call, it primary audience today, are Searchspring clients.
0:36
So, you know, Searchspring pretty well, You understand the need to drive the ultimate shopper experience and are talk at our team all the time about how to do that, I’m sure. So we’re excited today to roll out another part of our of our platform for site search and product merchandising and Personalization.
0:55
We’re going to talk specifically about integrated spell correction, so here I am in my my home Webinar Studio and I’m excited to introduce you to our panelists today.
1:10
So they happen to be two of my colleagues, Salma and Gabe, so I would like them to introduce themselves way better and way more exciting than when I introduce them.
1:22
So, Salma, why don’t you begin, you go ahead and turn on your camera, Tell us who you are, introduce herself, and then we’ll we’ll go to game.
1:31
Sounds good. Thank you, Jason. My name is Salma Mashkoor, I’m a senior product manager here at Searchspring and I work on products that are shopper facing. So that’s, you know, things like integrated spell correction or autocomplete. My job is just to make sure that these products are meeting customer needs and business.
1:49
Thank you important Salma that’s important Gabe. How about you, because you’ve also got an important job. Why don’t you introduce yourself for us?
1:57
Definitely. Thank you, Jason, Gabe Tome one of the customer success managers here at Searchspring with customers, like everybody who’s joining here today, to walk them through the features, make sure we can help them out with any questions and sharing their experience here at certain things. The best optimizing plans, you know, just ultimately, helping create that.
2:14
Central customer experience, I’m excited to be here. Here.
2:17
Landscape?
2:19
And just so everybody knows, we’ve got our webinar producer. Anthony behind the scenes.
2:23
I usually mention that because sometimes I’ll talk to Anthony.
2:27
And, no, he’s not my imaginary friend. He’s actually back behind the scene. So if I if I had mentioned him, I’m not going crazy.
2:34
It is actually Anthony behind the scenes there in Atlanta. So, let’s move on to our agenda today. So, you gotta we gotta really focused agenda where we want to talk about spell correction.
2:46
I want to talk about why spell correction is is important to the benefits of spell correction We want to talk about our new feature integrated spell correction in Salem was going to walk us through through a demo there. And you know, Gabe has spent a lot of time with our beta clients on this feature, and so he has some, some great insight from those beta clients to share with everybody. So we’re really looking forward to that. I think it’ll be a good session, and frankly it’ll be a relatively short session. We probably won’t go longer than 20 minutes.
3:21
So if you’ve planned extra time in your calendar than just know that you will get that extra time back and go have a coffee break, or whatever you need to do in your day. So let’s move on and talk a little bit about spell correction, right?
3:35
I think one of the things that I like to do from a contextual perspective is just make sure that everybody who’s in the audience understands what we mean when we talk about spell correction.
3:46
So, Gabe, why don’t why don’t you start off and help us understand, like, what is spell correction. Why is that important? Why is an important part of what we do as as e-commerce merchants?
3:59
Definitely, like the points that you’re out there on the screen, pretty much summarize, Say, ultimately, having spell corrections on site is really a central nowadays.
4:07
Because, know, with so many sorts of information that are being done to us. Every single moment. Social media, people talking to you know, our attention is a really important asset. So, anything that you have that is disrupting that attention is going to affect shopping experiences.
4:20
So, ensuring that you know, any misspellings, any errors on the customer side, you know, are being fixed or as close to being fixed as we can to stop crack, is essential to make sure that we keep that customer attention, You know, from what we’ve seen here, is the beta customers. When customers are looking for anything on the fashion space, you know, misspelling dress should return, you know, results, page, should be, you’d still see those items, because it’s simple misspellings. In other industries, like the music industry, when customers are a little more specific and there may be searching for specific part numbers are skews. Having one misspelled letter additional number should return any results, right? We should want to make sure that experience is cohesive and as essential for them. So having these tools are just the best way to make sure that customers are still engage on the site and mature overstating that conversion at the end of the day.
5:05
Alright, So anything to add to that as we talk and we kind of get into more specifics here, anything to add about spell correction in general.
5:13
Mean, I think Gabe hit the nail right on the head of grants and that shoppers can find the products that they’re trying to find. It can get to the page as they want to get to, you know, they’re not being derailed by misspellings and seeing a bunch of zero results and that creates a better user experience. That’s what drives conversion.
5:29
Exactly. Great. Yeah. It looks, it’s about intent, it’s about discovery. It’s about driving conversions. So I really appreciate that.
5:37
Kinda get into the meat of the webinar now. We want to do an overview of integrated spell correction. So Selma, I’ll let you take it from here for for a couple of minutes you know. Tell us a little bit about what integrated spell correction is. I know you’ve planned to show us what it is, but just tell us a little bit about it before you give us the, before you give us the demo.
5:59
Sure thing. So the reason we worked on this feature was because we wanted to answer this question, how can we reduce the incidence of your result pages and improve the quality of the corrections that we are giving shoppers? So in order to do that, we executed a few changes. So the first thing that we change this up, shoppers can now search with whatever their raw query, Whatever they type into the search bar, That’s what we search for.
6:23
If that generates no results, then we will correct the term away.
6:27
And what that does is, it ensures that we are never correcting a term that would otherwise return results.
6:33
The second thing we wanted to work on was improving the quality of our corrections.
6:37
So, instead of relying on the English dictionary, we now make corrections based on the product catalog, because their product catalog has a lot of like, rich, interesting data that might not be in the English dictionary, you know, whether that skew data or brand data. So, relying on that as a source of truth, as to whether a term is spelled correctly or incorrectly generates more accurate corrections.
6:59
The last thing we did was we created a block list, which allows merchandisers to block a term. so that it is not correct it up.
7:06
But, instead of talking about it, I’m happy to pull up my screen and walk you through the process. Yeah, Let’s do that.
7:18
Can everyone see my screen?
7:20
Yep. Looks good from here.
7:22
Right. So, this is a test environment, and I’m just going to walk through this use case of using integrative spell correction. So for this example, I will search for a brand that I know is not carried on the store.
7:36
So I’m looking for affinity product.
7:37
And I can see these suggestions for a fancy, fancy dress, but, as I said, you can now simply hit Enter, or click Search, and just conduct a search for whatever it is you typed in that search bar.
7:51
So you can see that no results were found for what I searched for. So the system did actually attempt to look for that term. But instead of showing the results page, it now conducted a search for the top question, which is fancy.
8:04
So, you’re probably wondering, where is this word coming from? Why fancy?
8:09
So, just navigating to here. And this is Search Preview, it’s, like, our internal tool to understand why we are generating the corrections and the results we January.
8:19
So, similarly, I searched for fenty here, and it was corrected to fancy, it has fanciest found in the product data here.
8:27
So if I look for Fancy, you can see it’s one of the keywords that’s within the product catalog. So that’s my regenerating this fraction.
8:35
Now, if you didn’t want the word fenty to ever be corrected, again, that would be a good candidate for the blacklist.
8:42
So that leads me over here. So, you can go in and add a new blocks terms, such as fenty, so that when you type it into that search bar, it would not show any suggestions, and it would not correct?
9:00
Thanks, Elmo.
9:01
I mean, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a brief walkthrough, but it shows exactly what, you know, the real, the real benefits are. So again, I just wanted to follow up with you with two things.
9:12
one is would you just, one more time explain the block list, because I think the way I would explain it is what’s on the block list, are things that actually SharpSpring will actually search for? So just can you clarify that for us?
9:28
Yeah, so I think the block list is an ideal thing to use. if you intentionally want your customers to actually see a zero results page. So, something like Brands, Brands, are a great candidate for this, right. So, if you see that a lot of shoppers on your site are searching for a brand, you don’t carry like, fancy, you can simply throw that in as a blocked her.
9:47
So that’s why I shop. I searched for affinity. They will just be taken to a zero results page, which clearly demonstrates, Hey, we have no products to display, We have zero results because we do not carry this graph.
9:58
Done, and then gave you’ve got strategies that you work on with your clients, about, what do you do when you hit a zero results page, right? What’s the next step? What do we want to do? How we drive that experience to be the most interesting thing?
10:12
Yeah, for sure. Because you’re ultimately up to today. Most people would think that, you know, results page. Or something That we never want to get to, the psalmist point. You know, whenever there’s maybe brands that you don’t carry hitting that no results page is learning experience for the customer Know, Hey, maybe, you know, they don’t carry this brand. But let me see what other options we have.
10:28
To that point, you know, there’s definitely things we do on the merchandising side where you can create what we call, like, no results campaigns to actually merchandise those pages and instead say, Hey, inform the customer.
10:37
Hey, we don’t have bending, but here are some related items, right? So there’s definitely a lot of things to work around it. But the block list just helps ensure that the experience is kinda kept cohesive through the entire time, instead of just showing those irrelevant results without being able to control it at all, right, so it really gives the customers, at the end of the day, all the tools, they need to really decide. what kind of experience do we want to give the customer.
10:59
Excellent.
11:00
Then, Salma, just, I want you to jump back into the English dictionary because my, my brain, says, gosh, I want to be able to search for things that are in the dictionary? Because those are real words Help me understand. You know, what? What? That’s all about?
11:17
Absolutely, yeah, So there are real words in the English Dictionary, but that’s not all as relevant to the products that you offer at your in your store, right?
11:25
So for making corrections based on that, you might be correcting turns towards things that do exist in the English dictionary, but not necessarily things that you offer as products, so you kind of get these low quality fractions. But when you rely on the product catalog as your dictionary of what Corrections should be made, you’re actually producing Corrections that will take users to actual products that you offer.
11:52
Sorry, I’m just making a note here. As I showed you, I’ve taken all these notes. I made sure I thought of doing. So, again, I think, you know, is that, is that something that you work with?
12:04
You work with clients on, making sure that, you know, their, their product data, you know, as meaningful as it can be, and help them organize their data, so it returns the right searches, and that helps with their customer experience.
12:17
Definitely, because, ultimately, you know, sometimes, whenever we do rely on like the English dictionary, that’s where we see those weird corrections come in.
12:23
So now we have the ability to rely entirely on the customer’s data, that’s more of an incentive nowadays, to be like, hey, this is the time to clean up the data, because cleaning up data is something that’s tough. Athena Day, if it’s not well kept since the beginning. So having this, totally, just to kind of re-iterate, that is definitely helpful. Because at the end, it’s going to benefit the customer, right?
12:42
So, yeah, definitely appreciate the push that we’re doing here for that as well.
12:48
Excellent.
12:49
Yeah, as as most people who join these webinars frequently can attest, and conversation, always turns to the data. At some point, whether it’s about data, cleanliness, or whether it’s about understanding how it’s organized, or whether it’s about understanding what’s in the, what’s in the dataset, how to analyze it, how to see the trends and that sort of thing.
13:07
So, again, it’s, it’s incredibly important to have that conversation with the team, with the team here.
13:13
Great.
13:15
Well, Anthony So here we go, my, my, my invisible friend. Yes, we’re gonna go one more slide on integrated spell correction salma.
13:25
There’s just one more little comparison chart about spell correction. Just can walk us through that, So it just kind of very crystal clear. This is what it is. This is what it’s not.
13:37
Absolutely. So the first major difference between fixed spell correction, which was the older version that we are using here and integrated small fraction is that shoppers can now search with their raw query, as I demonstrated. When I conducted a search, I was not forced to search for the term fancy. I can actually search for the term fenty.
13:57
The second major change is, this block lists that we’ve generated, if you want to block terms from being corrected, if you want your shoppers to see a zero results page, then this is the tool to use.
14:07
The last edition is switching from Using information from the English dictionary to using information from the product catalog to make the actual corrections.
14:17
Great.
14:18
Thanks Salma, and we’ll talk about next Steps quickly.
14:22
I want to keep my 20 minute promise here to everybody. So we’ll run run through next steps quickly and then, and then thank people for being here. So one is, you know, we’d like you to get excited about integrated spell correction and, and this new feature. It is definitely something that people have asked for. It is something that our product team has wanted to do. It is something that we as a company understand that it’s going to help drive that shopper experience. So get excited about that important thing for, for us to be releasing.
14:55
Second is for clients, like you, on the webinar today, we’re going to begin that upgrade process, sort of mid April. They will start that process around the second week of April.
15:07
If you have questions about your site or integrated spell correction, or anything we talked about today, the right, the next path, the right step would be contact your Searchspring CSM and that Customer Success Manager. There you go, gave you, raising your hand. You can begin to answer some of those questions and, and help walk through, you know, really, what the next steps are for your site, specifically. And then lastly, from the next steps perspective, we’ll make sure that everybody who’s, on this call receives recording, because there are probably others in your organization who may want to watch this. Or you may want to see it again. Just to understand the demo more. And more time, in, more depth.
15:52
So those are our next steps.
15:55
Thank you for being here. Thank you for attending the webinar.
15:59
I’m glad we could keep it in our 20 minute time limit Salma Thank you for the time, Gabe. Thank you for the time.
16:09
I really appreciate it. And I appreciate everybody who was on the call today to learn a little bit more about integrated spell correction.