How an AI-powered Search Engine Automates Workflows with CRM

And Sajari’s a leader in the field.

Sajari is an advanced AI-powered search and matching platform geared at alleviating that frustration by allowing users to search using contextual information—like an entire document of what you want to learn more about—to find precisely what they’re looking for.

They’ve been around for about four years, and recently, Alex Kennedy, the Marketing Executive at Sajari, made the decision to add a new addition to their company’s arsenal of business tools: Copper.

We sat down with Alex to find out how Copper’s helped Sajari in both their day-to-day activities and as an entire organization.

Sajari offers smarter search experiences for websites, e-commerce stores, and even apps by surfacing items related to your search keywords. It does this by tuning into your needs, which it determines based on analytics like your data on your customers, in order to help them achieve their goals—and simultaneously, yours.

“Search and matching” is a concept many people aren’t too familiar with, so here’s a quick breakdown of how it works. Sajari is made up of three main pillars:

1. Site search: Using machine learning, Sajari’s algorithm is actively evolving based on what your users are clicking on.
2. E-commerce search: This lets you connect your private business-side data to customize your search algorithm.
3. Matching: This lets you take both structured and unstructured data like a user’s profile and use it as a search query to find matches.

Before CRM, Alex and his team were relying on an “internal CRM” and didn’t have a standalone product in place yet. Instead, they would manually update a spreadsheet with customer details on Google Sheets, build it out, then send it off to anyone else who needed to see it.

“It was a bad idea, as you can imagine. We didn’t have up-to-date records and we couldn’t really easily configure an interface where we can track all our customer interactions.”

We asked Alex to elaborate on what their “internal CRM” looked like.

“It had a record of all our customers and their profile, accounts, and analytics. It was basically somewhere we would store that information internally, which we called a CRM."

But of course, it wasn’t really a CRM.

“We needed an actual CRM—one that’s up-to-date, accurate, and easy to use. So we began shopping for solutions.”

Most people would be surprised to know a lot of search platforms today don’t own or engineer any search technology. They are instead built using open-source technology from the '90s. And while a lot of businesses out there are still using this open-source technology, many are searching for something a bit more… up-to-date.

“Sajari is built completely from scratch—we’re not relying on open-source tech. And because we’re able to build our product ourselves, we could foresee and build for how important machine learning is today.”

In order to really understand what Sajari was looking for in a CRM solution, we asked Alex what their goals were as an organization. “This year in particular, growth is something we’re really going after. By the end of the year, we’re aiming to hit some pretty key goals as an organization. So, we’re focused on polishing our product and making it as appealing as possible.”

Profits and product. Yep, that sounded just up Copper's alley.

As you might’ve guessed, Sajari now uses Copper—meaning things are a lot less manual. But more than that, they were blown away by the integrations Copper’s platform offered. Namely, Copper’s Gmail integration played a big role in their purchase decision and has changed the way they manage their customer relationships.

Here's how that Gmail integration looks:

"Now, if we need to email someone, we can easily go through a customer’s record and see what we’ve sent so we’re not doubling up on tasks.”

Aside from managing their customer base (and emails), Copper also integrates with the other tools in Sajari’s tech stack:

• Intercom conversations are automatically synced to the respective customers’ CRM records.
• Mailchimp pulls information from Copper, allowing them to send mass, personalized emails.
• When someone signs up for Sajari’s newsletter via Mailchimp, they’re automatically added to Copper.
• NPS scores obtained via Intercom are automatically added to customer records in Copper.

Alex adds: “I really like how user-friendly it is even with a bunch of other integrations.”

“It’s like we’ve discovered Frankenstein’s monster of customer success. Copper is the central source of truth for all of our relationships.”

Today, Sajari employees just under 20 staff members—with more and more marketing and sales pros. They all have access to the CRM.

And they’re growing—fast.

“We’ve had some big enterprise clients who want to do really interesting things with millions of search records. We just opened an office in San Fran, and we’re keen to build out into a bunch of different verticals.”

We look forward to watching them continue to grow!