Keyword search clearly wasn’t working as well as it could for H&M’s shoppers, so it has been working with Voyado globally on the issue. Using the retail-first agentic CX suite, we’re told H&M has moved from basic keyword matching to intent-driven discovery in more than 60 markets, resulting in customer exits down 30% and soft exits slashed by 80%.
“Search is one of the highest-intent moments in the customer journey – and one of the most mishandled,” so for H&M, operating at a global scale with an almost infinite number of product combinations, “that gap was costing them significantly,” Voyado said.
Together, they built an “intent-driven model that reads a richer set of real-world signals simultaneously”, including purchase behaviour, add-to-bag actions, stock availability, revenue performance, product newness and real-time customer intent.
Customer exits dropped almost a third “with more people finding reasons to stay, explore and buy” while soft exits, where customers drift away due to friction rather than choice, were greatly reduced. “Together, [the] numbers tell a single story: relevance never goes out of fashion. When customers feel understood, they stay. When they stay, they discover. When they discover, they buy.”
Lars Gezelius, acting global head of Digital at H&M, added: “As our business grew, we needed a more intelligent approach to search, ranking, and discovery. The H&M search overhaul demonstrates what the infrastructure can deliver in practice. It also signals what becomes possible when a retailer commits to understanding its customers rather than simply cataloguing its products.”
Voyado CEO Erica Sandelin Ekelund added: “The most successful retailers won’t be those with the most extensive catalogues. They’ll be the ones who understand their customers and what they actually came for.
“The era of one-size-fits-all e-commerce is ending. Customers no longer expect to browse and find; they expect brands to understand what they want before they’ve even searched.”
