Ubisoft: rich Salesforce Commerce Cloud search in every country, on every device

The challenge

Surfacing the right content to the right user

Ubisoft’s business model relies on the power of big licenses such as the well-known Assassin’s Creed game. With their new subscription model, leveraging the depth of their catalogs and licenses is key. 

Ubisoft is a leading creator, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and services, with a rich portfolio of world-renowned brands, including Assassin’s Creed®, Far Cry®, For Honor®, Just Dance®, Watch_Dogs®, and Tom Clancy’s video game series. The teams throughout Ubisoft’s worldwide network of studios and business offices are committed to delivering original and memorable gaming experiences across all popular platforms, including consoles, mobile phones, tablets and PCs. These big licenses have comprehensive sets of games, extensions, DLCs, and derivative products. Today, on their 17 online stores, Ubisoft needs to quickly connect their users to what they’re looking for. However, users keep using broad search terms such as “Assassin’s Creed” or “Trackmania”. Depending on the breadth of the game’s catalog, this can lead to enormous amounts of content search results, making it difficult to present exactly what the user is looking for, and to create an engaging connection. 

In addition, Ubisoft’s business teams need to highlight business promotions and launches for new games or recurring licenses, and retrieve associated content in search results.

The solution

The right tool to support Ubisoft’s worldwide presence

Ubisoft choses Salesforce Commerce Cloud to deploy their online stores worldwide. For their search and discovery, Ubisoft needed a robust, flexible, and easy-to-use tool to deliver outstanding user experience for all languages and currencies used in their different markets. A successful POC with Algolia ended with a 20% uplift in the mobile conversion rate on the French store, while the British website noted up to 40% in conversion rate. Key drivers were Algolia’s core search functionalities such as out-of-the-box typo tolerance that helped decrease no-results rate from 20% to less than 5%, as well as ease of use for marketing operations. 

Decision was thus made to deploy Algolia on all 17 Ubisoft online stores.

• increase of 40% in conversion rate on the british website 
• increase of 20% in conversion rate on the french mobile website

Build fast, deploy even faster

It took less than 3 months for the Ubisoft team to implement Algolia on all their product-based experiences for France and the UK, from their e-commerce store to the mobile version to their online gaming platform, Uplay. From there, they implemented across 5 countries within 6 months. 

While fast and easy to deploy, Algolia gave Ubisoft’s business and IT teams the desired flexibility to set up relevance rules and synonyms specific to each country’s language. Handling multi-currency and multi-languages proved to work with Algolia, allowing for instance their Brazilian store to have 9 different currencies. Algolia’s flexibility and ease of use will make it easy for any local team to manage search and discovery.

“We've had great results using Algolia, which has been really easy to integrate with Salesforce Commerce Cloud to manage configurations across different countries. We plan on extending its usage from 5 to all 17 online stores in 2020” David Leveau, E-commerce project manager at Ubisoft

Facilitating cross-functional collaboration

At Ubisoft, 3 teams are using Algolia, each of them following specific goals. The IT team took care of the initial implementation, as well as the data model and the overall search configuration. Marketing and E-merchandisers teams interact with Algolia for their specific purposes. 

A striking example is the use of Analytics made by Ubisoft’s Marketing team when competitors launch new games. When users search for competitor games on Ubisoft’s online store, the marketing team can take note of which keywords users are choosing. With the help of the Operations team, they can use these keywords to set up synonyms and redirect users to Ubisoft’s equivalent games, thus drastically reducing the number of no-result pages, and boosting sales of their own games. The collaborative use of Algolia Analytics, Rules and synonyms has empowered business teams to quickly react and adapt to market changes, while boosting their productivity.

The result

Partnering for the future of Ubisoft’s online experiences 

While Ubisoft’s teams started to implement Algolia on the online stores, several new opportunities appeared for the company to leverage Algolia to deliver unified content and product based experiences on other platforms of its ecosystem. 

As a top industry player, the company owns multiple websites and portals with various types of content scattered on these platforms. Ubisoft is aiming at using Algolia to index content siloed in these different sources. Adding this to the products from Salesforce Commerce Cloud already in Algolia, they can create a federated search experience on their corporate website that will mix products with content such as FAQs and news.

Promotions and marketing activities being the backbone of Ubisoft’s online strategy, teams are thinking about spreading the use of Algolia to the marketing websites they create for game launches. The operations team plans on further increasing the use of Algolia merchandising tools to better highlight and surface promotions as well as related content in the search and navigation experience. 

The company is also exploring the way towards personalization to inject users’ previous behaviors and purchases in search results, and thus become even more relevant to users and customers. 

“Algolia plays a key role in Ubisoft's online experience. As part of our transition to a subscription model relying on a growing and extensive catalog, surfacing the latest game releases or new live content to our users is key to guide and retain them.“