Central Group is an impressive multinational conglomerate based in Thailand with subsidiaries in a wide range of sectors. Founded in 1956 as Thailand’s largest department store, the company has continued to grow exceptionally. Still family-owned, the company has expanded to serve customers throughout Asia and Europe with a diverse portfolio under the “Central” banner. Ever-evolving, Central has embraced new retail formats, such as an omnichannel experience, to serve changing customer lifestyles and expectations. Today, it is Thailand’s leading multi-format, multi-category, and omnichannel retail and wholesale platform.

The company has been building a strong omnichannel experience for its customers to make shopping easier and so that they can move more seamlessly between offline and online — ultimately leading to greater sales. Its Thai e-commerce customers are unique in their focus on product quality. 

“When customers think of Central, they see it as the go-to destination for endless shopping inspiration, offering a wide variety of products with exceptional service seamlessly integrated both online and offline,” says Kunapas Thongpiam. He says the variety of products and the smooth shopping experience Central’s platform brings customers is its strength.

Central Online primarily focuses on Central Group’s e-commerce activities related to its department stores. With a vibrant and energetic team, Central Online adopts an increasingly agile approach to its business.

“It’s getting very energetic and agile,” Thongpiam says. “I’ve been here for five years, and I’ve seen a lot of changes. It’s become more productive and fun, and more modern in the way we work. Everything is getting more effective.”

Search is essential to creating the customer experience the Central Online tech team strives to achieve. “We always try to think in terms of a customer when we work on the search experience. We do mockup experiences of how they're going to feel, and how they will see each key element.”

“One of the crucial things we’re trying to solve is providing the ability to search in Thai keywords. This is quite hard and causes quite a challenging search result.”

It’s a challenge, among several, that Central turned to Algolia to help them solve.

The challenge

Unlocking search functionality

Before adopting Algolia in 2021, Central used Elasticsearch as its search engine platform. The Central Online tech team saw an opportunity to improve search functionality by moving to Algolia Search.

“Algolia unlocks a lot of functionality, and that’s the scenario that we always wish for with our customers,” Thongpiam says. “For us, Algolia works completely differently, with a different kind of logic and interface. It’s a lot more user-friendly for a non-tech person like me and the business unit team.”

He says Central worked with Algolia’s Tech team and handled the migration effortlessly. The implementation was part of a larger workflow change that had been planned for approximately two years. Over the two years, Algolia continued to assist Central Group with the planning and setup of Algolia products while the company underwent the re-platforming of its e-commerce platform."

Central has implemented Algolia for Search, Browse, and Carousels, as well as several features, including InstantSearch, Query Suggestions, Dynamic Re-ranking, Rules, and Dynamic Filters. It is taking advantage of built-in integrations with Akeneo, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and Adobe Commerce. Thanks to these integrations, Central was able to re-platform to its Algolia e-commerce tech stack without significant impact on search.

“Algolia is not just a search tool for us; it’s an overall product display management tool,” Thongpiam says about the importance of the platform.

Central Online brought its agile approach to working with the Algolia team on search optimization, hosting weekly calls to discuss strategy, search trends, and analytics. The Algolia team has also worked closely with creating a solution for recognizing Thai keywords, creating “tokenized” keywords for the Thai language.

“The Thai language is quite complex for the way search works,” Thongpiam says. “In English, usually you have a space between each keyword, and that’s used to provide relevant search results. But in Thai languages, we sometimes don’t have a space. It’s a whole sentence in the search queries, with three words combined with no spaces.”

Artificial intelligence, namely Natural Language Processing, capabilities found in Algolia was the answer. “We worked with Algolia and the way to solve this is to tokenize the search text, to split those words into separate, single tokens for search. It’s fascinating stuff.”

The solution

Improving merchandising and engagement

Importantly, Algolia helps in the Central Online tech team’s continuous work of improving user experience and user interface. Its ability to scale while maintaining blazing fast speeds is an asset, as customers can search Central’s more than 69 million record catalog with search-as-you-type results coming back in milliseconds.

Central uses Algolia for search, but also on product listing pages and to power browse and carousel functionality. The platform’s ease of use has made it a valuable tool for merchandising.

Algolia Rules has had a significant impact on merchandising. Initially, the merchandising team saw search rules as a short-term, quick fix for specific campaigns, resulting in thousands of rules. After re-platforming it used AEM to manage the rules, and the tech team began working with its Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Algolia to adopt contextual rules for campaigns. It now uses contextual rules as part of dynamic campaign pages, instead of creating rules manually in AEM, avoiding the time-consuming job of creating hundreds of landing pages a day for new campaigns.

“I think it’s safe to say this saves us days of work,” Thongpiam says. “It’s just a simple five-minute set up of rules on the system, and that's it.”

The result

Boosting Conversions with AI-Powered Search and Dynamic Filters

Moving to Algolia, especially implementing Dynamic Re-ranking (DRR) has had a direct and powerful impact on click-through rate (CTR) and conversions. 

“Before using Dynamic Re-ranking, search results were quite repetitive and based primarily on price,” Thongpiam says. “When we implemented DRR, results showed more variety of products and ones much more relevant to customers. We would never have been able to do this manually.”

“We are also seeing a lot of improvement in CTR and conversions from using DRR and working with our AEM team to see the results of the second round of A/B testing of it.”

Algolia Dynamic Filters capabilities, recently implemented, are further helping the company improve conversions by helping customers be more engaged and making it easier to make purchases. By moving from static to dynamic filters, the company is improving the relevance of search results.

Beyond all the technological merits, Thongpiam says one of Algolia’s core strengths for Central has been the Algolia customer success team, it's proactivity and personalized approach, like that seen in solving the Thai language challenge.

“Everything’s personalized to our needs,” he says. “Our company has its own preferences, our own targets and challenges, so it’s great to have a partner like Algolia that helps find ways to solve issues from our perspective.”

“Algolia always comes and saves the day for us."