Your office with SCHÄFER SHOP: Customers reward individualized catalogs

Peter Schwan, Head of Strategic Marketing at Schäfer Shop:

„The project management ensured that the prudsys RDE was smoothly integrated into our IT infrastructure. We are convinced of the advantages of the prudsys RDE: Artificial intelligence generates relevant recommendations for each of our customers. The significant increase in turnover and orders speaks for itself.“

The objective

In order to obtain better results from an individual customer approach, the company decided to use the prudsys Realtime Decisioning Engine (prudsys RDE for short). The real-time solution is based on artificial intelligence and automatically generates product recommendations that exactly match the customer’s interests across all customer channels. SSI Schäfer Shop GmbH wants to be able to offer its customers relevant products that optimally reflect their interests using artificial intelligence. The company also aims to increase orders and sales compared to manual product selection. And to keep the internal effort to a minimum, they would like to set up an automated process that can generate individualized content in newsletters and print mailings.

The solution

Smartcom and prudsys made the objectives of SSI Schäfer Shop a reality. Smartcom GmbH & Co. KG took on the project management and process implementation. prudsys AG used the prudsys RDE to select highly relevant content for print catalogs and newsletters. Intelligent algorithms that analyze customer behavior in real time and react immediately to changes guarantee maximum recommendation quality.
Having analyzed the available product and customer data at the start of the project, interfaces were created to SSI Schäfer Shop’s existing IT systems. Relevant product images and text are automatically circulated up-to-the-minute via these interfaces. The images and text are automatically optimized throughout the process and incorporated into the newsletter or print product.
The print product is a 16-page self-mailer catalog, printed in more than 100,000 versions featuring almost 5,000 different products.

The result

Compared to manually selected product recommendations, SSI Schäfer Shop has increased its sales by up to 8% since using the prudsys RDE. The office and furniture supplier has also increased orders in the top customer segment by 15.2 %. The number of buyers rose by 2.4 %. And thanks to automated product selection by the prudsys RDE, less manual effort was required by staff.
SSI Schäfer Shop also benefits from the fact that the prudsys RDE takes the whole product range into account when calculating its recommendations. It independently tests customer acceptance for long tail products and new items in order to increase purchase probability.
Thanks to the positive results, SSI Schäfer Shop will also be using the prudsys RDE in future for individual content in newsletters, catalogs and package inserts.