Trigger: Customer Searches

Use this trigger in a dialog activity to begin or continue the activity based on the searching behavior of our customers. For example, we can send an email message about a promotion to a customer who searches multiple times for a certain product.

Example

The following example is an example of a dialog activity that uses this trigger effectively:

When a customer searches for coffee 5 times within 2 days, send an email message to the customer about a coffee sale:

We can then target customers in the Customers who like coffee customer segment with relevant promotions and marketing activities.

Note: The previous example dynamically updates a customer segment. When creating the customer segment, we must select the check box labeled Use marketing activities to add or remove customers on the General Properties tab. This check box must be selected for these dynamic updates to take place. For more information, see Action: Add To or Remove From Customer Segment.

Prerequisites for using this trigger

• Ensure that the site is configured to support the Management Center marketing features.

Guidelines for using this trigger

When you set up this trigger, we must specify which keywords customers must submit for their search to match the trigger. We can specify the following Keyword matching rule options:

• The search keyword is exactly a specified value. Phrases (multiple words, such as coffee makers) are supported. Do not include quotation marks for exact matches.

• The search keyword starts with, contains, or ends with a specified value. These three keyword matching rules do not support phrases. To enable phrase support for these matching rules, we must customize WebSphere Commerce search to meet your business requirements.

• The search keyword is any value.

• The search keyword is not required to return any catalog entries in the search results for the trigger to work. A customer needs to search only for the keyword value or a specified synonym.

We can also specify the following additional settings:

• Whether to consider synonyms of specified keywords when evaluating this trigger.

• The number of times the customer must search for the keywords.

• The time frame in which the customer searches for the keywords, for example, within the last two days.

Note: Be aware of the following if you use this trigger with the following actions:

• Send Message

• Issue Coupon

These actions do not work for generic users. Customers who are generic users cannot receive a coupon or a message (email or text message) because generic users share a common ID. When a user first accesses an e-commerce site and is browsing product pages, the user is a generic user. When a customer completes an operation that requires a unique identity such as adding a product to the shopping cart, the customer is converted from a generic user to a unique guest user. In addition, for the Send Message action, customers must opt in to receive email or mobile marketing messages, which a customer can do during the registration process.

For more information about user types, see Users.