Sears wants to be the perfect place to buy the perfect gift. We were looking for ways to be good advisers to our shoppers and be able to tell them exactly what to buy for their loved ones in order to improve the shopping experience and sell better.

We found some pretty interesting tips in social media: every tweet, fav, hashtag contains valuable information about each person's interests. It shows the things that they like best, wish, covet.

So we use all of this info, to make a perfect gift recommendation. This is how The Gift Tester was born.

The results were pretty evident: if the shopper was satisfied with The Gift Tester's results, they would purchase immediately.

The Gift Tester proved to be a smart and creative way to use data to sell more and better. And of course, improve the overall customer experience with personalized recommendations based on the most intrinsic information available. It is both relevant and innovative.

Our results were very satisfying:

- 95% of the people that used The Gift Tester, took home the recommended gift.

- Satisfaction polls increased among our costumers from a 76% to a 92%.

- The visitor average increased 25% during the time The Gift Tester was in stores.

We are proud to say that The Gift Tester made Sears the perfect place to buy the perfect gift.

Data is KING. And there are 2 kinds of data being used in The Gift Tester:

1. Social media data. This valuable information is shared publicly online by each user. It has tweets, favs, retweets, hashtags and many words and phrases in them giving us all kinds of data about the person: what they like, what they wish, what they think, how they think.

2. Sears product database. Every single product in the store is accounted for. Additionally, we assigned special keywords to each product. These keywords describe the products in form, use and lifestyle.

These 2 sets of data are being matched every time The Gift Tester runs a new gift test. The Gift Tester reads them both and finds matches between them, resulting in the perfect gift recommendation.

The Journey Of The Data

Think about a person that continually posts, favs and tweets about visiting different cities, with hashtags such as #travel #roadtrip #surf and retweets a quote from Lonely Planet, and also tweets about airports or outdoor activities.

All these posts would have important keywords that The Gift Tester software would recognize belonging to certain products in the store such as travel bags, camping equipment or travel mugs. These are the products that it would recommend as the perfect gift, having read what the person has said and talked about the most in their social media profiles.