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Sitecore Symposium 2017: Journey to Customer Experience Success

A Sitecore Symposium 2017 speaker today addressed the journey to customer experience success. The following are my notes:
The presentation started by imagining a day in 2027:

  • Wake up early
    • Coffee is ready and at the right temperature
  • Looks at his family status
    • His daughter has an increased temperature.
    • Made changes to calendar
  • Food algorithm suggested his menu including lunch and dinner. He ordered takeout to arrive when he gets home.
  • AI managed his calendar as things change.
  • His shoes communicated with him and told him it’s time to get new ones. He chooses a new pair and orders them.
  • Takes the commute to work, in a driver-less car

Some of the drivers:

  1. Everything is a screen.
  2. Everything can be controlled by speech.
  3. Personalization is an imperative.
  4. AI will take personalization to the individual level.

You will have a digital self based on what you say and do in real life. It will be able to make the same decisions you would take.
But that’s the future. It’s still struggling today. Chatbots can be especially funny because they lack the context. So today is about getting ready. Get ready by:

  • It’s a data game. You need to have the data on your customers.
  • Connecting the customers interactions
  • Contextualize the experience
  • Design for customer convenience
  • Customer delight by exceeding the expectations

How to Get Started

The Sitecore Strategy Plus team has developed a variety of tools. This includes the SBOS board game. The games helps you understand where you are today and some plans for tomorrow.

They use a CX maturity model to understand how you get from attract to convert to advocate. Playing starts with  strategic objectives, such as:

  • Increase customer satisfaction
  • Reduce costs
  • Increase revenue
  • Talent acquisition
  • Increase employee Satisfaction
  • Increaes retention
  • Increase share of wallet
  • Expand customer base
  • Reduce churn

The game then has you make goals based on the objective:

  • register
  • donate
  • purchase
  • sign up for newsletter
  • create profile
  • etc.

Which brings you to tactics to hit the goals:

  • personalization on geo
  • A/B test important call to action
  • Use analytics to optimize marketing spend
  • etc.

Which, of course, leads to the business case:

  • What measured improvements will you make with the tactics?

The game is really a strategy discussion.

Sitecore Experience Cloud

There is a brand new Forms module. It’s drag and drop and allows you to easily hook up to campaigns and goals. You can highlight a goal met when the submit button is hit for example.
The presenter walked through a demo with the experience cloud in the marketing modules. You can create a campaign for content, commerce, and email marketing.

Personalization

You can also use profile and personalize the experience from the most simple: click stream analysis to the most complex, personalization based on what you know and what they want. PZN rules can include exceptions. For example, don’t personalize an offer if they already booked a trip.

A/B Testing

When you make a change, the system will ask if you want to approve the change with a test. It can then walk you through the setup of the test. The UI is pretty straightforward.

Insights

Creation of any personalization rule or optimization test gives you automatic reports. You can access that at the PZN or testing interfaces.
The full analytics view lets you analyze the data in a variety of ways. This includes path analysis, basic stats, performance data, etc. That means Sitecore Cortex (AI) will tell you where paths work and where they don’t work. The analytics also lets you filter by personas. What value do your customer segments gain? Is your site optimized correctly for them?

Coolest New capabilities

  1. New Marketing automation tool. It’s completely rewritten. It allows for dynamic segmentation among other things.
    1. The journey builder is on par with what you see from other vendors now.
    2. It’s fully integrated with content and commerce.
    3. It’s integrated to your objectives and goals you’ve setup.
    4. it includes the ability to set a path to increase scores for users. e.g. you can more easily identify the key potential customers based on their actions.
  2. List Manager: There is a new and improved version. There are 50 new rules to create segmented lists. It gets you going faster.

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Michael Porter

Mike Porter leads the Strategic Advisors team for Perficient. He has more than 21 years of experience helping organizations with technology and digital transformation, specifically around solving business problems related to CRM and data.

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