June 03, 2022

Daniela Prada

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4 min. read

For the month of June, we are shining the spotlight on Aceik, an Australian SearchStax partner specializing in the Sitecore Digital Experience Platform. Aceik is an experience-led agency that has helped top clients, such as the National Maritime Museum, the NGO Plan International, and The College of Law, deliver compelling digital experiences. 

Greg Baxter, Aceik’s National Sales Manager and 5X Sitecore Strategy MVP, shared with us his insights on the importance of search in the digital experience. 

Digital Experience Starts with Search

Baxter notes, “It’s no mistake that in recent years digital has accelerated to being the channel of choice for information and product discovery. The OECD recently reported a staggering 60% increase in the use of digital in some countries.

Basically, that’s a lot of people, looking for a lot of stuff. Some of those people will be ‘clickers’, those who click around a site to find information – and some will be “searchers”, those who prefer to dig into search and fast track to results.

In parallel the digital experience arms race has been exploding, with a seismic shift to SaaS and composable solutions highlighting that customer experience is the heart and soul of success.

Big players like Sitecore, Adobe, Acquia, and Drupal have always known that CMS vendors are not experts at search technology – and that this vital component plays a huge role in setting the DX high water mark. Those vendors have allowed customers to make the search platform choice that best suits their business and marketing objectives.” 

Search Is a Key Pain-Point

Speaking from personal experience, Baxter explains, “As a sales manager virtually every brief I receive says the same thing… ‘our search is awful’.  It’s almost like search has been an afterthought for many businesses. It’s a massive mistake.

Your website is more often than not a giant information repository, it’s hard to fathom someone clicking that many times to find information that may be relevant, but deeply buried in the information architecture.

Don’t forget, search is the first interaction many customers will have with your brand – it’s a great idea that you don’t make them come with a shovel to find the gold. We want less friction and more convenience, every time.”

Relevance and Personalization Deliver Great DX

“This is precisely where advanced search technologies like SearchStax come in – by delivering relevance, filtering, and optimization from the customers’ first interaction. It’s hard to go past a search technology that not only does the job of making information discovery easier, but that also delivers so much rich, explicit and actionable customer experience data into your Customer Data Platform.

Personalization, analytics, UX accelerators and experience management can now be deployed right at the beginning of the customer journey, and that’s vital to ongoing engagement, customer satisfaction and fighting bounce. The explicit search information provides a telling snapshot of what your customers actually want, in real time, so it’s not difficult to see why Digital Experience Platform vendors love it. This information is actionable, so digital strategists like the team at Aceik can curate and craft the website experience post search and enrich the experience end-to-end.”

Last Words From Baxter

  • Search is often your customers first onsite touchpoint – don’t underbake it.
  • Digital Experience Platform vendors are now almost all composable – you can swap in and out the critical parts of your Martech stack. Start with search.
  • The data you reap from search analytics is gold – it’s vital in the era of the customer.
  • Value your customers and make their information discovery as easy and stress-free as possible – after all, they value you by doing business with you.

More About Aceik

For Aceik, digital experience combined with peerless technical ability is the life-blood of the company. They are proud to have a tight-knit team of digital experts who are true craftspeople, creating cutting-edge solutions with the latest Sitecore technology, solving business problems while forging long-term client connections.

Aceik was founded on Sitecore, and as a Platinum partner, they still boast the strongest Sitecore team in Australia. To this day, they have delivered over 100 Sitecore projects, have four Sitecore MVPs in their leadership team, and drive a fully certified Sitecore developer team.

By Daniela Prada

Partner Marketing Manager

"SearchStax Cloud Serverless complements our SearchStax Cloud offering by providing an option that enables developers to deploy and integrate Solr quickly with their website or application at a low starting cost."

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