Benchmark review reveals strength of ActivePoint's technology
New York, NY - April 20, 2005 - ActivePoint, the contextual natural language search and guidance engine that emulates the human thought process, announced the results of Maplin Electronics benchmark review of their customer conversion rate comparing online queries to in-store sales.
The review, completed at the end of December for the previous 12 months, determined that Maplin Electronics' cable division had a conversion rate of 11 percent or nearly 10 times the industry average of one to two percent for the customers that used the service compared to those that did not. The company is a rapidly growing electronic retailer in Europe, with over 100 stores and an online store.
"Maplin Electronics is expanding rapidly, and we need innovative technologies to support our growth, said Chris West, Internet Channel Manager of Maplin Electronics.
"ActivePoint is able to create relationships between a contextual search and our product line. It understands the English language, by making things that are relevant link together. The process for the customer is easy, and takes into account such ambiguities as grammar, spelling and quickly pinpoints exactly what the customer is looking for," added West.
Maplin Electronics uses the ActivePoint TX5™ Discovery Engine for its cable division, where there are 500-600 different electronic cables for sale. Maplin's square footage per store is not enough to display the thousands of available products, and catalog's are limited by paper size and printing costs, therefore the company has found that its Web site can provide a far greater range of product details.
"The capabilities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are not new, but the increasing usage of this capability to understand fine-grained details of queries by shoppers, as in the case of ActivePoint customers, or knowledge seekers such as internal/enterprise users, is reaching a new inflection point, as the strengths of these systems are more fully understood," said Dan Keldsen, an analyst and consultant for the Delphi Group, A Perot Systems Company. "Targeted use of NLP systems, which provide in-depth understanding of domain specific language and user needs, is an increasingly popular area for deployment of 'smarter search,'" he continued.
The TX5 patented system is a powerful software solution that can automate an important part of the online selling process. Its uniqueness is that it has the ability to find products using ActivePoint's natural language engine that incorporates contextual sentence understanding. This means that users can ask about products in plain English and expect to receive a pinpointed response. The TX5 Discovery Engine also makes use of specially formulated guidance engines that help direct the online customers towards the required information or products while simultaneously educating the customer about the product offerings. The natural language follows the interaction and is able to provide the user with pertinent information based on their previous choices.
ActivePoint's TX5 Discovery Engine is based on how a person normally goes about looking for something, and it does not limit the process to a few one or two word search terms, but instead encourages complete sentences with intelligent and responsive prompts to better serve the customer in the most unobtrusive way possible," said Moshe Ofer, CEO of ActivePoint.
About ActivePoint
ActivePoint, a provider of contextual natural language search and guidance engines, is based in New York, NY with development facilities in Netanya, Israel. ActivePoint's TX5™ Discovery Engine is a contextual relational search and guidance system that emulates the human communications process. Built on an application service provider (ASP) model, the company has customers in the US, UK and France. ActivePoint is a subsidiary of ActivePoint Inc., a Delaware holding company. TX5 is a trademark of ActivePoint Inc. ActivePoint is a registered trademark of ActivePoint LTD. For more information go to www.activepoint.com.
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