Title Nine Gets More Customer Service Muscle with SLI Systems Hosted Search Solutions

Women’s Sportswear Retailer Leverages Learning Search to Help Phone and Catalog Customers Find their Favorite Brands or Products, and Simplify Online Searches

CUPERTINO, CA – May 5, 2009 – Employees at Title Nine, a women’s sportswear retailer, often need to search for certain brands, types of clothing, or sizes among the 400 clothing and accessory items they stock for customers for their e-commerce site, brick and mortar stores, and catalog business. With Learning Search from SLI Systems, a provider of on-demand, intelligent search services for Internet and e-commerce sites, Emeryville, California-based Title Nine now has site search that allows both employees and online shoppers to zero in on just the right yoga pants, swim suits, tennis skirts – or whatever item they seek.

“With SLI’s powerful site search, our customers benefit greatly from being able to find relevant products for the keywords they use, and refine their searches,” said Erin Kriessmann, director of e-commerce for Title Nine. “An unexpected benefit is that Learning Search speeds up our customer service team’s ability to answer questions over the phone for customers, or to simply find out which products we have in stock.” Title Nine also uses Site Champion, SLI’s user-generated SEO solution, to improve the effectiveness of SEO campaigns and drive more traffic from organic searches to its e-commerce site.

Learning Search, which returns highly relevant search results by continually learning from visitors’ aggregate search queries and click-throughs, was chosen by Title Nine to replace a search solution that was a standard component of the company’s e-commerce platform. The previous site search product was extremely limited in its search capabilities, Kriessmann said.

“We couldn’t search for anything other than the specific name of the product,” said Kriessmann. “For instance, if a customer told us they liked a certain yoga pant, and were wondering if we had products similar in style or color, we couldn’t complete such a search, nor could we refine searches to narrow the results.  The previous solution also couldn’t account for misspellings or abbreviations, which was a major annoyance. With SLI, we now have the ability to mine our data, which helps us serve our customers faster and better.”

Kriessmann also expects to use Learning Search to improve Title Nine’s e-mail marketing campaigns. Before Learning Search, the company’s marketing staff was limited to using the landing pages available on the site. Creating custom landing pages for e-mail campaigns was time-intensive, and required constant maintenance as products sold out and new products were introduced. Learning Search now does the work of creating landing pages and results are dynamically updated, giving Title Nine the ability to creatively merchandise and market products by e-mail.

Title Nine also leverages SLI’s reporting capabilities to gain insights on popular searches by customers, and uses that data to inform purchasing decisions. “The reporting is pushed to us daily by SLI, and we can see when customers consistently search for a certain product or brand,” Kriessmann said. “If we only carry a few types of that product, or a few pieces of that brand, we know we should consider offering more of those items to our customers.”

About SLI Systems

SLI Systems is the developer of learning-based search and navigation technology for corporate Internet sites, e-commerce destinations and consumer Internet portals that Searches, Learns and Improves the user experience.  SLI Systems’ hosted site search and user-generated SEO solutions empower businesses to enhance customer satisfaction while increasing sales, reducing costs and yielding valuable customer information.  Unlike traditional search software, SLI Systems’ patented technology continuously “learns” from the behavior of visitors over time to deliver more relevant results. SLI Systems is a privately held company, with offices in Silicon Valley, London, and Christchurch, New Zealand.  For more information, visit www.sli-systems.com, or see the company’s blog at http://blog.sli-systems.com/.