EXCLUSIVE: Rugs Direct personalizes online customer service with artificial intelligence

Sharon Gautschi, Sales Director at Rugs Direct

Specialized online store with decorative surfaces rugs uses artificial intelligence to better tailor search and discovery on its e-commerce site.

Rugs Direct offers a wide range of products and a diverse customer base, including consumers, professional designers and commercial clients throughout the United States and Canada.

The age of the store chain recently spoke with Sharon Gautschi, director of sales at Rugs Direct, about how the retailer is using Constructor’s AI-powered product discovery platform to help shoppers find products that best suit their specific needs.

What merchandising issues did Rugs Direct face?

We have over 20,000 items and 130,000 SKUs in our product catalog in 11 categories. With such a large catalog of rugs and complementary decorative items such as pillows, throws and wall decorations, we meet the needs of customers with many different needs, interests and aesthetics.

It is important that every user of our website can easily find what they love about their designs and decorations. Our approach to digital marketing is to guide the client through education and inspiration.

Inspiration often comes from showing individuals compelling products and design ideas that spark emotions and create connections. We can educate our customers through our content, technology-enabled experiences, and even product features.

Rugs Direct had a legacy product search and discovery solution that did not support our “educate and inspire” approach. As we grew, it was unable to grow with us.

For example, the legacy solution didn’t effectively handle sorting products based on popularity, newness, or buyer history, for example. Our internal technology team needed to bring a lot of firepower to the tool, and that wasn’t where we wanted to focus our efforts.

How and why did you choose and implement Constructor?

We were nearing the end of our contract with an old supplier and at the time we were evaluating other suppliers but found they were not performing well with our product catalog. We sell products based on parent level and SKU level, and other platforms we have reviewed will have to process our data in a more clumsy and roundabout way. However, the designer had no problem with it.

We use the Constructor tool on Rugs Direct to enhance our product search functionality, including automatically suggesting, filtering and sorting search results displayed to buyers; and browse experiences and landing pages. Constructor enables our site visitors to see compelling products and results that match their intentions.

I also appreciate that Constructor allows us to “refine” and “remove” products based on attributes such as brand and construction type when searching, browsing, and auto-suggesting.

Before Constructor, I could only arrange them, so the experience was much more static. Sorting was based on a formula that we wrote and entered into the tool. Now I can better match the information I display to attributes such as promotional strategies, inventory management, seasonal trends and buyer preferences.

Constructor’s ‘Collections’ feature in particular has been a game changer for us and has delivered great engagement. This allows us to bring product collections to life with customized and dynamically curated landing pages. We often create seasonal collections based on trends and editor-picked collections, as well as ranges designed for niches, such as durable outdoor and RV rugs.

Our suppliers organize photo shoots to highlight these trends, and with Constructor we can build a cohesive experience around the products to tell the story. We use Constructor to set parameters for the products displayed on our landing pages, and Constructor’s artificial intelligence and automated rules help determine the best products (and their order) to display to individuals.