English
Goodman Manufacturing Embraces Headless Commerce
Goodman Manufacturing is a subsidiary of Daikin Group, the world’s largest B2B manufacturer of heating, ventilation, and cooling products. Since 1982, Goodman Manufacturing has focused on helping millions of homeowners achieve reliable, high-quality, and affordable indoor comfort with products that continue to be designed, engineered, and assembled in the United States.
The Challenge
Leading B2B companies across the world are embracing headless commerce, an ecommerce solution where the front-end presentation (head) has been decoupled from the back-end commerce functionality. A headless commerce platform enables businesses to put powerful experience tools as the “head” and drive real growth at a fraction of the cost.
With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the need to develop a digital presence, Goodman Manufacturing wanted to outstrip its competitors and embark on a digital transformation journey. Goodman desired a solution that would underpin the digital experience of all three of its brands — Goodman Dealers, Daikin, and Amana — while allowing their uniqueness to shine.
With the market rapidly changing, Goodman Manufacturing knew it needed to create a digital channel for its customers to do business in a different way.
Customization and personalization is something that is an opportunity for us. That is one of the beauties of headless. We’ve got multiple brands. Instead of having three different solutions for our major branding, we are able to use the same technology.
Laurence Scharff
The Solution
Bloomreach Discovery has made a huge impact on Goodman’s product discovery experience. Goodman can now deliver accurate search results designed to improve conversion. Through the use of natural language processing, advanced attribute extractions, and past visitor behavior, the most relevant products are shown to visitors thanks to artificial intelligence.
Goodman has used Bloomreach’s AI-powered technology to quickly learn which products are performing best and personalize how products are displayed by segment.
One of the things that led Goodman to Bloomreach is the changing B2B marketplace. Millennial and Gen Z employees are rapidly entering the workforce and bringing with them different buying preferences. According to Gartner, 73% of 20 to 35-year-olds are involved in product or service purchase decision making at their companies.
Young employees are far less likely to be content with phone calls to sales representatives or filling out tedious order forms. Gartner also stated that almost half of millennials prefer not to interact with a salesperson during the purchase process and are over twice as likely as baby boomers to be skeptical of someone assisting them with a sale.
“When we looked at the 85 million millennials out there, and how they are going to buy their heating and cooling systems, we thought that the process was going to be very different from the extremely traditional two-step process,” Scharff said.
The Results
Investing in headless commerce has allowed Goodman to make data-driven decisions that will set the company up for future success.
“We’ve learned what the customer is actually doing,” Scharff said. “The analytics and the data that we are getting from our ecommerce platform have opened our eyes to a lot of things.”
The freedom and flexibility of a headless architecture allows for opportunities to increase customer engagement in B2B. It enables your business to decouple the customer-facing front-end that powers your ecommerce experience from the commerce functions and business logic that powers your business on the back-end.
This empowers your company to deliver customer experiences to any screen or customer experience platform it desires to. Learn more today.
