A fundamental search principle for any online commerce store is helping shoppers find the right products quickly and effortlessly. Empathy Platform takes it a notch with the new Related Prompts feature, which introduces a dynamic, conversational dimension to the search experience. This powerful approach not only enhances product discovery but also helps retailers drive better engagement with their shoppers.

Unlike traditional search suggestions, related prompts are synthetically generated, enabling rapid deployment without the typical challenges of a cold start. They allow for a more conversational and intuitive search and discovery experience by generating additional natural language queries in real time, offering shoppers alternative ways to phrase their search queries, reducing friction in their shopping journey, and increasing product discoverability.

Why Related Prompts?

Like Related Tags, this Related Prompts new feature highlight relevant phrases that shoppers may not have thought to search for explicitly. However, Related Prompts takes it a step further by offering full natural language queries, which guide shoppers to explore specific or alternative products and categories.

While traditional search suggestions rely on historical, contextual data, Related Prompts leverage synthetic generation. This means prompts can be created without waiting for data on how shoppers interact with your store. Using Empathy Platform’s proprietary models, these queries are tailored to each retailer's product catalogue, offering an entirely customizable and flexible approach to search optimization.

The potential of Related Prompts

Empathy.co strongly believes that the strategic definition of the Related Prompts feature extend far beyond search results optimization. By leveraging advanced algorithms to syntetically generate natural language search suggestions, Related Prompts stands as a catalyst for your business growth to enrich your shoppers' experience and foster greater shopper engagement:

• Synthetic generation
  Related Prompts use advanced algorithms to understand the context of a search and generate meaningful, human-like queries. This enables retailers to enhance the shopper journey without historical data, delivering more relevant and timely results.

• No cold start challenges
  Since Related Prompts are synthetically generated, there’s no need to accumulate behavioral data to get started. This avoids the common cold start problem, where a system struggles to deliver relevant results without prior data, allowing immediate deployment.

• Privacy-first architecture
  As part of Empathy Platform's commitment to data privacy, Related Prompts are generated within a secure, privacy-first architecture. The underlying models ensure data provenance and governance, making Related Prompts ideal for those who prioritize privacy and compliance. This feature can even be deployed within your own cloud infrastructure, ensuring full control over data management while adhering to privacy regulations.

• Customizable and curatable
  Related Prompts are managed and customized through the Empathy Platform Playboard. Like other search suggestions, prompts can be curated to suit business needs by adding new prompts to align with active campaigns, promoting prompts to drive search behavior, and removing irrelevant or low-performing prompts.

Guiding shoppers naturally towards accurate results

Related prompts make the search experience easier and more intuitive for shoppers by offering conversational, real-time suggestions. With just a few clicks, shoppers are guided towards more relevant products, refining their searches effortlessly.

Let’s walk through the seamless steps that ensure a smooth search experience from start to finish:

1. The shopper enters a query in the search bar.
2. Natural language queries are generated based on the original query using Empathy Platform’s synthetic generation models.
3. The prompts are shown on the search engine results page (SEPR), guiding the shopper to explore alternative or more specific relevant searches.
4. The shopper can click on a prompt to instantly refine their search, leading to more accurate and relevant results.

Easy customization with Empathy Platform Playboard

As a retailer, setting up the best search and discovery experience with Related Prompts for your shoppers couldn't be simpler. You can manage and customize the synthetic prompts directly in the Empathy Platform Playboard, ensuring flexibility and control over prompt optimization.

You can access the Related Prompts management tool from the Play menu. It has a similar look and feel to other Playboard tools, so setting up your prompts to ensure the search experience remains fluid, relevant, and aligned with your goals is a breeze! You can monitor, activate, and customize (create, edit, delete, and promote) prompts and related queries according to your active campaigns or business needs.

Continuous upgrades with Open Innovation

The most compelling aspect of Related Prompts is its commitment to innovation without losing simplicity. Unlike traditional search suggestion features, Related Prompts offers a conversational approach anyone can understand.

Related Prompts is a shift in how shoppers interact with your commerce search, opting for human-like queries for a smooth shopping experience. In conclusion, this new search feature stands as proof of innovation, leveraging the latest trends in artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology driven by Empathy’s Open Innovation (opens new window) projects.

Ready to transform your search experience? Contact your Key Account Manager to learn how Related Prompts can elevate your store’s search performance.

Privacy and Compliance

Related Prompts are built with privacy and security in mind. In order to respect shoppers’ privacy, these prompts are generated and processed within a secure, privacy-first framework that:

• Ensures data governance by operating within your own private cloud infrastructure if needed.
• Supports data provenance by providing transparency into how prompts are generated and the data context used to create them.
• Adheres to privacy-first principles, ensuring shopper data remains protected and never exploited without consent, thus maintaining compliance with regulations such as GDPR.

Real-world use cases

Don’t limit yourself to a product search and discovery context to guide shoppers to related or complementary products. These prompts can help generate dynamic SEO pages based on common queries, such as “best bicycle for the city”, improving search engine rankings, and driving more organic traffic.

Indeed, improve content discovery using Related Prompt in large product catalogues or extensive content libraries to help shoppers navigate efficiently with contextually relevant queries, increasing engagement and time spent on the site.

Stay tuned for real-world use cases where Related Prompts will leverage your commerce search experience!