The 2017 Sitecore Symposium kicked off with a video highlighting multiple customers wanting to be free:
- To get the things they want
- To be understood
Mark Frost, new CEO of Sitecore, kicked it off. He spoke about significant tech improvements that help brands connect with their customers.
Stats:
- 2,900 attendees
- from 57 countries
- 600 companies represented
Mark spoke about three key areas: innovation, quality, and customer delight.
Key investments in the coming months:
- Machine Learning across the entire portfolio
- Commerce: We will be a major commerce player.
- Data and Analytics: xDB is the core. They want to make it the ultimate destination.
- Extensibility. Available for any developer in any environment
- Quality: Raising the bar across the entire portfolio with better usability and fewer defects. This also includes getting community input.
- Customer Delight: Added a Chief Customer Officer, Added new customer programs and more support staff. Will be doing implementation reviews with customers and partner.
CMO Scott Andersen
Excited to announce the Sitecore Experience Cloud and many other improvements.
Data and Integration
Introducing Sitecore xConnect. They are APIs to capture data across every screen, device, and source. This will allow data collection at scale from all channels. It will be cloud first, secure, and private.
Includes connectors to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.
Machine Learning
Introducing Sitecore Cortex. This is machine learning for real-time insights across native and third party customer data. Think of it as your own personal data scientist. It will be surfaced throughout all of Sitecore’s products.
- Powerful insight from xDB data
- Segment Discovery
- Content Scoring
- Continuous optimization
- Super-Charged Personalization
Use Case: They walked through a company habitat home delivering experiences to Vicky. Initially thought she was a gadget lover.
- Already know a bit about Vicky since she’s a customer
- Sitecore 9 already has some of Cortex woven in
- Can ingest data from ERP, CRM, POS, and other systems
- Does this using xConnect
- Think of gathering info on her stage in the buying cycle, signals on her intent, who are people like Vicky, etc.
- In this case, they integrated a multiple listing service for home buyers. Through this, they found out she purchased a new home.
- Use that information and related info to understand that homeowners like Vicky have a tendency to purchase home theater systems
- With this info, can create a new campaign for the new segment.
- Creates content options for A/B testing
- Connected living room and my digital life were the themes
- Connected living room won
- This allows them to personalize Vicky’s experience with a connected living room theme
- Creates content options for A/B testing
Commerce
The goal is no longer one single transaction. They want many transactions based on a profitable relationship over the lifetime of a customer. Sitecore is re-architecting Commerce with many new benefits:
- Integrated markteting tools
- Powerful pricing and promotions
- CRM Integrations
- Integrated Content and Commerce
This will include Cortex integrated to Commerce. It includes Merchandise manager, pricing and promotions manager, customer and order manager (lookup records with xConnect data).
They continued with Vicky’s journey. She hasn’t bought the home theater system yet. This journey is configured by a single platform, Sitecore Experience Cloud.
- Experience shows a page personalied to her with a similar home image
- The layout gives recommendations on how to setup the room
- Habitat mobile app gives her a discount offer on the tv and an offer to experience the sound of the home theater.
- App includes a beacon feature
- Which allows a store employee to find and initiate a conversation
- Cortex also recommends a 2-year warranty.
- The rep then completed the transaction on the floor
Conversation with Toro
Bryan from Marketing and Chris from IT
Question: What’s driving digital transformation?
Answer: Fewer customers are buying Toro by brand. To foster loyalty, brand need to establish a direct relationship with the customer
Question: Tell us about your journey.
Answer: We created an app called my Turf for golf courses. Great for tracking everything. Now has a MyToro app. Connects to the lawn mower and lets you know when maintenance is needed etc. Also tells what parts you need and enables commerce transaction from Toro or a local distributor.
Question: How did you establish the criteria for what you needed?
Answer: We had a couple challenges because we needed to connect with golf partner and the resellers on the B2C side to have a direct connection. To get this right, we had to take a step backwards and determine what our customers needed.
Question: This is built on Sitecore Commerce and Content, right?
Answer: Yes
Cloud
Sitecore Experience Cloud on Azure allows:
- Faster time to market
- Native Azure support
- Scale up and out
- Secure, reliable, familiar
Sitecore has been working closely to optimize for Azure PaaS.
Azure PaaS allows you to deploy a variety of topologies in 30 minutes. Does this in a scalable fashion either up or out. This deployment also means no downtime.
You can choose how to host. With Sitecore, with a certified partners, under public and private optoins.
Use Case: Subset of customers like Vicky in Australia. They need to expand there.
- From Azure, clone the existing app. It’s a local content delivery instance in Australia
- Can also clone databases, etc.
- What if the campaign is super-successful
- Team can plan on how to scale seasonally. Allows you to set parameters like data range or CPU %
- Enable auto-scaling in Azure
- Set rules on the auto scale.
- Set threshold at 80% CPU usage
- But also want a brand new set of content.
- Possible using the Marketplace
- Walked through a setup of the new server
- Topology in a series of clicks
L’Oreal Story
Running 600 websites on Azure PaaS. Chose Sitecore because of the customized and personalized experiences. Had to deliver sites across 60 countries and 15 brands. Needed something that was elegant and easy to use. The key factor was Sitecore’s ability to deploy globally scalable solutions while still integrating to various back end systems.
Question: What challenges?
Answer: We had lots of business units, agencies, etc. Needed to coordinate with all these teams to execute globally. We have been able to deliver at remarkable speed, delivery sites in a matter of months.
Answer: Now have more users, more mobile experiences. This is allowing us to be a leader in the beauty vertical while giving the experiences to our consumers.
