When it comes to the experience a modern, consumerized buyer has come to expect from sellers across industries, it’s not as hard as you might think to exceed – not just match – those expectations.
The key is being able to play by your own rules. Literally.
And at Logik.io, we’ve amassed a team with over a century’s worth of combined experience in all things CPQ to help you architect the strongest possible environment to do so.
Our world-class Commerce Logic Engine is uniquely designed and consistently refined to provide you, your administrators, and your buyers the technical support you need to sell more, sell faster, and maintain less – all on your terms.
With the debut of our newest system feature, Solving Engine 2.0, comes notable improvement upon and expansion of four key features designed to help you hit business objectives: determination rules, exclusion rules, messages, and product actions.
Our product developers and engineers have identified these four pillars as the most direct routes to improving your overall selling environment, for front- and back-end users alike, with as little ramp up and acclimation time as possible.
In the words of Logik.io Director of Product Management & Customer Experience, Chris Haussler, Solving Engine 2.0 provides a level of fine-tooth granularity and nuance that firmly places our offerings ahead of other engines on the market, and helps return a sense of human interaction to the sales funnel without relying on reps themselves.
Determination Rules
Determination rules are a subset of product rules facilitated by configure, price, quote software that leverage buyer input and deploy follow-up actions accordingly.
In Solving Engine 2.0, our determination rules are able to override, replace, or clear out associated fields, as well as trigger new types of messages to present (those, we’ll take a look at shortly).
Because of the intricacy with which these rules can relate to one another, you can architect more specific, guided paths to the end of your sales funnel for buyers to navigate.
Single points of input can be translated across multiple fields with increased capacity for rule layering, and rules that don’t have an active association can be skipped.
Our last Logik.io Commerce Engine update brought about the launch of “Sets,” which lessen manual data requirements in favor of increasing rule re-usability and input replication. Read more on this groundbreaking advancement in our blog spotlight.
Let’s say you have a set of 100 determination rules built into your environment, and your buyer inputs preferences that trigger rules 29, 46 and 81. In prior, less developed scenarios, your system would have to start processing at rule 1, and make it all the way through the succeeding 80 just to accommodate three actual points of logic.
Now, those rules can dynamically trigger independently of the larger rule chain, and process without the situationally-irrelevant 78 scattered between.
This means that your buyers are able to quickly and effortlessly begin their shop, but still end up with valid, highly customized solutions.
Exclusion Rules
Another niche type of product rule supported by Logik.io, exclusion rules in Solving Engine 2.0 help narrow down possible configuration and order options based on what can’t work together.
Any seller worth their salt is trying to strike a balance between placing buyers in the driver’s seat, but still providing the guidance and expertise they’d get from a sales representative in more traditional settings.
Exclusion rules subtly but effectively restrict the buyer from pairing incompatible items or making physically impossible modifications, instead directing them toward inventory or service options that better align with each other.
In self-directed settings that lack such restriction, there’s a high risk of buyers misselecting or misunderstanding what’s in front of them, leading to order returns and low rates of satisfaction.
Are you giving your buyers a helping hand by incorporating attribute-based configuration into their experience? Our ultimate guide to all things configuration can help you get started, for free – just click
Getting ahead of these potential errors by removing them from the shopping experience is the best way to stabilize your tech stack and ordering process in one fell swoop, especially if you’re planning on scaling up business over the course of the coming years.
Alongside existing options like guided selling technology, which uses questionnaire-style surveys to gather buyer preferences and make product recommendations in response, exclusion rules reduce the amount of pre-existing product knowledge shoppers need to come prepared with and better highlight available solutions.
Messages
While not exactly rules in and of themselves, messages within Solving Engine 2.0 have been updated to function with more targeted cause. Without being tied to individual fields, messages can present in one of the three following manners:
- Informational messages: Informational messages are untethered points of data that help buyers refine their selections by presenting product information and descriptions, use case examples, bundled or promotional options, etc. in dialogue-box style pop ups.
- Error messages: Triggered by existing determination or exclusion rules, error messages alert buyers to something in their order that needs to be addressed and/or corrected before they can proceed.
- Warnings: Similar to error messages, warnings deploy under certain conditions to advise buyers of potential misconfigurations, but can be manually overridden if the buyer still wishes to proceed.
All of the above messages can also be customized by your business with branded icons, brand-specific color palettes, and other formatting options to maintain a consistent visual experience and play into color theory.
Product Actions
The final component to Solving Engine 2.0, our product actions provide a holistic lift to your maintenance requirements by moving away from a reliance on custom scripting. Many out-of-the-box CPQ tools require extensive scripting to make minor changes or updates, draining valuable resources on low-impact projects.
The Commerce Logic Engine is constructed to pull known quantities from internal fields and increase both rule and input reusability as it does so.
Creating custom actions that leverage existing input and pre-populated logic provides buyers with dynamic, intelligent configuration options in ways that are easy for them to understand.
Solving Engine 2.0 delivers hierarchical bills of material (BOMs) with simple point-and-click administration. That's right, no scripting necessary!
BOMs can serve different purposes depending on how they’re constructed and with whom they’re shared. Manufacturing BOMs and sales BOMs, for example, highlight different aspects of an order depending on who the intended audience is.
Hierarchical BOMs visually nest product components and add-ons branching out from your final product or service, creating a different kind of order representation than traditional, or “flat,” BOMs, which organize each component or add-on as a line item of its own.
Looking back to the goals of using this engine to help you sell more, sell faster, and maintain less – the connections are clear. Solving Engine 2.0 has the capacities your business needs to get the right products in front of the right people at the right time.
If you think it’s time to take the Logik.io leap of faith and try things out for yourself, we have subject matter experts ready and waiting for you to reach out.
