Oldie but a goodie

Pros

Solid long-standing platform with an excellent customer success team

Cons

All customization requires development $ from integrator

Powerful, Flexible Personalization tool

Improve conversion and AOV

Pros

Certona Experience Manager is a powerful End-User Tool that allows me to update strategies, and A/B test regularly and get reporting to optimize the experience and drive conversion.

Cons

Occasionally CEM glitches, gets hung up puts me in blacklist mode a bit too often, would like to be able to copy individual strategies to separate containers, to same container for modification. Tagging logic , REc Demand logic was difficult to confirm with other analytics software like Omniture.

Certona Recommendations

I did enjoy working with the Certona team and loved the recommendations, but it was a set it and forget it plan as we couldn't track the results and/or make any additional changes as we wouldn't know if it would hurt the bottom line or help us.

Pros

I loved the ability to customize the software to meet the Company's needs on all of our devices: website, iPad app, CRM, and analtyics package. We had the ability to download the information to work on an off-line mode as well.

Cons

While the recommendations were good, we lacked the ability to track our results - we were unable to measure ROI, run A/B tests, as well as make upgrades, such as content recomendations. This was our developer's 'fault' due to incredibly high costs, but in a nutshell without results - we're unable to make decisions.

Solid tool for personalization and engagement, with some minor flaws

They make it very easy to see where they are driving revenue and engagement, which I appreciate. Their testing and reporting is thorough and easy to follow. The account management and customer success teams are helpful and friendly. They always have a list of new ideas to test so that your strategies don't get stale, rather than just setting something up and then forgetting about it.

Pros

Personalization engine and algorithm are strong Team supports frequent testing to ensure that your strategies are working optimally Account managers are thorough and easy to work with There is great continuity among account staff - you don't get bounced from one rep to another Team makes lots of suggestions for improvements and how to best optimize your use of the software

Cons

Some pieces are not as easily customizable as I would like On some things, support queue can be very long Building some reports in the portal can be tedious or difficult to get to

Time saving recommendation tool

Manually setting up recommendations is impossible given our staffing. The support from the Certona team has been exceptional in the last several months.

Pros

The software with the assistance of our Certona team has done a great job making product recommendations across our 3 unique sites. Using Certona has allowed us to spend less time and effort on manually setting up recommendations in addition to providing better results than a manual or simple algorithm could provide.

Cons

It took several months to achieve optimum results given the complexity of our data.

Excellent Customer Service

Certona has allowed us to create a more personalized experience for the customer on our website and within emails. They generate additional demand by subtly suggesting products to shoppers based on past and like behaviors.

Pros

We have loved working directly with our client success team. They are constantly working to optimize our strategies via very thorough testing.

Cons

The platform has always been a bit clunky to work with, but their teams are always available to help work through any questions we have.

Tweakable, good performing recommendations

After several tests we're convinced that Certona recommendations perform better compared to hand-picked products. Once you did implement the code and know the software it's quite easy to use.

Pros

The product recommendations: we did several tests and the recommendations perform better compared to hand-picked products. The use of strategies to setup recommendations: it's not a complete black box, but you can actually tweak the settings.

Cons

No lay-out flexibility: Each recommendation 'container' has just 1 lay-out (template). It would be nice if you can switch lay-outs using the parameters in the URL. Example usecase: we can't use product image1 in the first recommendation and product image2 in the second recommendation. This cannot be solved using 2 containers, because they aren't attuned to each other.

Algorithm works well

Overall, experience has been pretty good ROI - however, I wish turnaround times would be quicker and during holidays it can take up to a month or longer for technical issues to be resolved.

Pros

The algorithm has been tested across many companies and people, and seems to work well for basic product recommendations in the normal placements across the site.

Cons

The UX is not the best - CEM is a little archaic and the reports are very basic excel outputs and not organized in the best way.

Feedback after 2 years of using Certona

Pros

The best thing about the company is the Customer Support and contact persons we work with. The second best is the openness of the company to search for non-trivial solutions for the emerging business requirements

Cons

Configuration UI could be more responsive

Stellar customer support and account management

Overall the support from Certona has been solid from day week and has remained at a high standard throughout. They have really helped us turn any idea into reality.

Pros

The flexibility to try lots of ideas, experiment and learn from the data.

Cons

The CEM UI is a bit clunky but this is easily improved.

Certona Product Review

Overall our experience is positive and enjoy the benefit of this product across our site.

Pros

The majority of the software is very customized. We use the software for running recommendations across the website which has worked well to increase customer experience and shoppability.

Cons

There has been frequent technical issues where implementations have been delayed and need time to spend investigating issues. Overall some of these technical issues have slowed us down.

Good product with great customer service

Pros

The team at Certona are excellent - very attentive and always willing to help or proactively come up with a workaround. The product itself works very well for the needs of our site, something which can only be built on as we roll out their visual search.

Cons

The back end operating systems are quite dated and confusing

Certona Recommendation is Trash

They are one of the worst vendors I’ve ever had to work with. Their product managers and technical specialists don’t know how to implement their own product. They change the solution multiple times and caused several delays in the project timeline. They don’t take ownership and seems like they don’t even know how to solve for basic use cases.

Pros

Nothing at all, for being “best in class”

Cons

Terrible API integration, unable to support cross-selling and up selling with an API implementation.

Certona makes my life easier

The level of service we receive from Certona is remarkable. They bring so many insights to the tables, and are always full of ideas to improve our placement strategies. Because they serve so many clients, they always have their finger on the pulse of what is working right now in the eCom world.

Pros

Ability to quickly test new strategies and optimize our placements across the site and emails.

Cons

We rely very heavily on the Certona service team to make weekly updates...I would love to see an improved UI that would make self updates easier.

Certona Review

Pros

From an email standpoint, I appreciated the flexibility of how you can utilize the recommendation containers within the email.

Cons

From an email standpoint, I do wish there was an easier way to A/B split test different strategies within the email. On the website you can do this easily but not so much with Email.

Let the AI do it's thing!

We want to offer better and more meaningful recommendations to our customers.

Pros

It's feature rich and can do just about anything you want from a product recommendation engine.

Cons

The UI of the dashboard is a bit confusing and cumbersome to navigate. Takes some time to learn how to get the most out of it.

Feeling in good hands with the level of support we get

We're continuously optimizing our strategies with Certona and it definitely pays off. I'm especially happy with the level of support we get form our account manager and data experts.

Pros

The software is easy to use and allows a great level of detailed strategies

Cons

I can't bulk exclude articles from the catalogue or replicate this to different catalogues An interface revamp would do it good as it looks a bit outdated.

Great Software Amazing Support

Pros

The tool is built to support generation of product recommendation on a massive scale. And services the Homedepot website brilliantly. The customer support provided by Rep Grossness is beyond compare. He is always very kind and helpful in his interactions with us and has provided us all the support and training that we needed in using the tool effectively.

Cons

The tool does not support multiple languages, In Canada it is mandatory for every website to be in English and French.

Great Service - personalizations

Support, customer service, engineering are always available, coming up with help, suggestions, optimizations and I love the fact that they are based in Europe.

Pros

I really like that personalizations are updated constantly. That means customers are getting recommendations dynamically.

Cons

The CEM platforms is not really customer friendly, a bit old style.

software review

Pros

extent of attribution and strategies to inform algorithms and recommended products

Cons

UI is improving but still needs work for "plug and play" set up

The most precisely configurable tool on the market

Pros

Certona is very configurable, whic enables us both to apply our merchandising guidelines and to provide very curated recommendations to the end users.

Cons

Some of the administrators woul dlike to be able to set the initial settings themselves, but the complexity of the Certona software means the Certona Team does the initial setting

A lot of possibilities for our campaigns

The general experience is good, the rep is helping a lot to make campaigns possible.

Pros

The possibility to generate different personalization strategies for our campaigns

Cons

The expiring time when you´re connected to the CEM, working in analytics, because you need to select again everything to continue with the analysis.

Certona Monthly Segmentation Update

Rep have been very helpful throughout the entire process and on our monthly update .

Pros

updating contents to production is very easy.

Cons

The process of updating the QA environment is very manual. I have to send the files a week ahead, unsure of the ETA (usually a couple days before the live date). It would be easier and efficient if it's not manual.

Certona Review

Pros

The personalization aspect of recommendations.

Cons

The UI of the CEM platform.

Great service level, UI and strategy / rules set up need improvement

Pros

Flexibility of strategies / rules and service level is much appreciated

Cons

UI is outdated, reporting capabilities in the tool are not very useful. I would also hope for an auto-tuning functionality and shift towards machine learning

From a data perspective

I appreciate the bi-weekly moment with our referents: we deep dive on tasks and tests, but it could helpful to see also the data about the monthly global trend to understand the overall performance.

Pros

The details levels of sections are appreciable, is organized in a good structure. Also the reporting it's very detailed.

Cons

I would like to have a section to create custom dashboards to share internally: select container, metrics, graphs and chart, make comparison among container. Moreover, I would like to have an efficient "preview tool" to understand how an A/B test is showed to the users on website.

Certona is a very helpful tool when it comes to personalization

Pros

- The possibility of having/combining a huge variety of rules for the personalization

Cons

- As I haven't actively worked much yet with the software itself i don't want to express my opinion for now on that

From a Digital Content point of view

The bi-weekly calls was a very interesting moment. Certona help to understand better our customer and how they behave.

Pros

How we can personalize the experience, and the possibility to test our ideas.

Cons

Is not user-friendly for my point of view, at the beginning is really hard to get used to. As I don't follow the project since moment 0, for me was difficult to have a full vision on this software.

Certona Review

Pros

- interesting through process around thinking of rails (e.g. Strategies)

Cons

- haven't used it enough to provide a fallback