Siteline Composable Analytics for Sitecore - Creating End to End Customer Insights

The understanding of customer and content experiences has changed
remarkably since it became possible to create composable platforms based
on best of breed solutions and service oriented architectures. Today’s
organizations have a deep well of experiential data to draw from where it
wasn’t possible to see into before. Data that includes interests, engagement,
time, depth of understanding along with opinion, intent, emotional resonance
and other psychographic data. People who can operate across these wide
sources to create insight based stories that reveal customer understanding and
turn that into actionable outcomes will move well ahead of their competitors.

These vast sets of data representing engagement across a wide set of devices,
content, history over time are essentials for creating contextual understanding
for every dimension of customer insights. Challenges are no longer focused
on data access or visualization, it’s in pulling all the pieces together in a
common story that an organization can operationalize into their culture and
ways of working. Making this into a continuous feedback loop between
engagement, insight, content and organizational response to the customer.

The current response to need has been piecemeal at best aligned with where
information is stored such as specialized vendor based analytics tools for web
engagement, ads or campaigns. Even using traditional bi analytics platforms
enables only a partial view of what is happening at any moment in time. Both
of these approaches resemble a traditional linear assembly line approach and
neither scale well when the data is distributed and fragmented.

Making critical decisions or forming operational models with these approaches
can introduce significant amounts of risk when understanding isn’t complete.
This risk increases with all of this information available in best of breed
solutions like Sitecore. Being difficult to stitch together into a common
understanding introduces risk into the operating model and also underutilizes
the very solutions being used.

The next few sections will look at how the Put It Forward Siteline Analytics
solution applied to Sitecore can bring together engagement across content,
commerce and experience to reveal deep understandings and strengthen
operations and validate the platform ROI.

Most organizations have at least one type of analytics solution in place when
it comes to customer experience. Either they rely on embedded reporting
within the solutions being used, highly specialized solutions from vendors with
a mix of purpose built traditional BI solutions. There’s nothing specifically
wrong with any of these approaches when the need is for a very narrow field
of view.

The primary question to answer with analytics solutions for Sitecore is: does
this actually give me insight about my customer, content and process all in one
that deepens our understanding and ability to act in response?

The specialized analytics solutions embedded within best of breed solutions
are valuable in certain contexts. Such as counting what has happened,
understanding inputs and outputs or loose performance concepts. Examples
are analytics platforms for ads, campaign performance or attribution models.
The value unlocked by composable analytics for Sitecore through bringing
together the distributed engagement data across multiple channels is to form
a contextual view of customer understanding.

What the customer is truly saying in response to your actions?

The effectiveness of trying to describe a customer story by using clicks to
describe what is happening is a failure of engagement analytics not the
storyteller. At every moment a customer is generating multiple events
that when tied together in the aggregate help paint a picture of the real
customer story. This story reveals how the interaction across multiple
channels and points of engagement about what a customer is really saying
in response to your engagement with them. The value of the customer
story is that it links their experience with your culture and how to use both
of them in concert to drive significant returns for everyone.

How to see the value of content in the customer journey?

Is the end to end customer experience understandable?

Composable customer experience platforms by definition mean that the
data is always fragmented to a significant extent making the experience
difficult to speak about in real-world terms. Removing the barriers to
stitching together information either for centralized viewing or triggering
events the net understanding of the customer experience is possible.
When the experience is understood it can be then optimized for conver-
sion and end to end lifecycle management.

The Put It Forward intelligent automation platform was created and built for
organizations who need to have the flexibility to work their own way. With a
single easy to use interface it integrates systems, enables process automation,
surfaces deep insights and connects them directly to the user all through a
no code platform that anyone can use. This brings teams together spanning
marketing, revenue, operations, finance, HR and IT enabling them to scale
their great ideas which make the difference.

Not everyone can be under the same roof all the time - distributed teams,
disconnected processes and data locked in applications are the limiting factors
of many organizations as they try to reach their maximum potential. Through
a common user interface and infrastructure, Put It Forward brings all of these
together. This data platform infrastructure enables people, groups and teams
to work and learn together quickly while getting the most out of insights as they
emerge.

This is not a copy of your data into yet another repository or requires some
heavy infrastructure footprint to enable. It works with the data where it is,
assembles into useful structures then delivers up to the ultimate consumer. This
controls costs, improves speed and unlocks scale of execution.
Any organization looking to scale with composable insights by leveraging their
current IT investments are given a new solution approach. Delivering on insight
scenarios from revenue creation, process automation through to supplier and
partner management.

Following are some of the use cases on how Put It Forward's Siteline for Sitecore
can help thoselooking to leverage better insights through composable analytics.

Next best offer - auto-segmentation personalization:

The other side of the next best customer (covered in Siteline Analytics)
is understanding what to offer your customer next. The AI engines
within Put It Forward help you dynamically identify customer segments
to direct resources at. Working with the customer data from operational
sources including your CDP, CRM and MAP systems to mine and identify
groupings of customers who are clustered by probability of a specific
outcome such as cross purchase, up level or act as a referral.

Customer LTV and Revenue Optimization:

Leveraging purchasing data coupled with the current engagement helps
you optimize your customer experiences for maximum revenue. Put It
Forward works with every aspect of the customer profile in unison to help
you understand what the true value is of your customer. This enables
you to expose what the true lifetime value of a customer is and deliver
compelling journeys to unlock the full potential of your offering.

Omnichannel Customer 360:

Unified customer profile sometimes called the customer 360 helps
understand the customer from every perspective. Using the same
integration and process automation flows that are within the Sitecore
processes the data can be piped into the Siteline analytics layer to give
you a real time view of the customer from all perspectives. Specifically
as they go through the onboarding process, to delivery, collections and
support across their lifetime.

Content and Engagement Attribution:

Every marketer wants to know how a specific movement in the customer
journey contributed to conversion. Seeing beyond how a piece of
content is performing just by the number of clicks is core to understanding
where value lies. By bringing together the content, customer journey
and the conversion channels into a single view you can see very clearly
which pieces of content contributed to a specific engagement outcome.
This enables you to see which events and steps in the customer journey
contributed to the ultimate outcome by tying together marketing,
content, experience and relationship management into a single set of
performance metrics.

Content Value and Utilization Metrics:

Getting a deeper understanding and visibility into the effectiveness of
content is central to leveraging the value of the Sitecore investment. The
Put It Forward Sensor you can see deeply into
how the content is being used. This gives you the ability to see content
depth of engagement - more specifically it is the merge of content
engagement with the campaign and user session information which helps
deliver this picture. This picture helps you understand which content on
the tree is contributing to conversion and ties it to the specific session.

Customer Journey Experience KPI’s and Mapping:

Coupled with content utilization and campaigns are how customer
journeys can be optimized to understand how they flow across ideal
customer profiles (ICP). These points of intersection represent the space
where a KPI can be used to illuminate the value that a piece of content, a
campaign step or motion helps convert a customer to the next step in the
journey. One common challenge that is resolved by this approach is to
understand where the friction points are in the process resulting in more
granular customer journeys.

Content Utilization at the Eustomer Point of Engagement:

The customer conversation is one of the most important steps in any
experience. Having that data locked in reports or applications is the
most effective way to diminish the customer experience. [Foresight]
from Put It Forward is a client that embeds directly into your customer
applications like CRM or Service Managers and brings together everything
the customer sees into a single pane. From email clicks in a campaign to
website visits to content read and the level of engagement with scoring
and probable outcomes are centralized for the user. This helps align the
marketing, sales and customer facing teams together across the customer
journey.

Engagement Platform ROI Maximization:

How you not only leverage the investment in Sitecore to get a deeper
understanding of the effectiveness of the content but also of how you
manage the content. By joining the session data between campaigns,
content and engagement you have the ability to create analytics views
by the structure of the content tree itself. This gives you the ability to
articulate the ROI of the platform at the platform and content level.

Governance, Risk and Compliance:

Centralizing views into the customer experience helps you ensure that
sensitive data is protected, auditable and traceable. Beyond the baseline
of fraud detection are the needs to help identify which customers are
receiving messages in different regions. Teams using this platform
can work with the large data sets to identify where and when specific
messages or content has been utilized. This gives you the ability to
provide an answer to a regulatory question about where a piece of
content was used, who it was delivered to and what level it was actually
engaged with.

Siteline Analytics for Sitecore enables the IT team to make the most out
of their strategy for composable analytics by giving them a single solution
to work with. This solution helps unify customer experience over best of
breed solutions and connect results across the organization. Which in turn
helps surface its own insights and values such as:

• No code solutions for composable analytics that the marketer can use
• Strong visualization of customer experience and journeys
• Enables the relationship between content, session data and templates
to be established
• Aligning marketing with sales and customer facing teams so they are
on the same page
• Architectural fit and ability to leverage existing IT infrastructure without
new overhead

IT knows very well from their view that there are many small pieces of
information scattered across the organization, this enables being able to
work with them in a unified way and help great ideas scale.

• With the investment in Sitecore and best of breed solutions that make
up your operational platform ask how is all of this data going to be
pulled together to make sense of.
• Traditional BI and composable analytics are two different and
complimentary approaches to understanding what is going on in the
organization. BI serves the purpose for after the event reporting and
composable analytics enables the automation of decision support.
• A core question to answer is - does the insight serve you or the
customer - for example, would your customer would be served with
the next best product offer immediately or would you be served if
knowing at the end of the month a number of other products you
could offer your customer?
• Look at where the insight needs to be placed in the process for it to
have greatest effect and how is it going to get to where it’s needed at
the right moment in time.
• Think about the integration process and access to the data that
needed. Is this going to be enabled by highly centralized or hard to
find technical skill sets or is it best served by operational teams that
are close to the data and processe.
• Get alignment on all business initiatives today and potentially around
the corner to ask providers how their systems will deal with the
multiple data sources, data quality, AI models to generate insight and
how the insights will be shared.