Sitecore Integrates Arke’s Cross Channel Engagement Tool into Experience Platform
Sitecore has a fairly complete package of functionality for customer experience management, but it doesn’t have everything. It knows that to be competitive and offer its customers a great platform to implement their CX strategies on, they need to continually innovate and grow. This is something Sitecore’s CSO – Darren Guarnaccia, talked to me about not that long ago.
Guarnaccia talked about the “connected customer” – the ability to understand customers across all channels in a seamless way. He also said that Sitecore has an open solution that allows tight integrations to expand on the capabilities the platform already offers.
So it’s not surprising that today Sitecore announces a deeper partnership with one its MVP’s Arke Systems. Arke Systems has built a Cross-Channel Engagement Tool (CCE) that Sitecore has received full intellectual rights to and will integrate into the Sitecore Experience Platform. What this means, is that you don’t have to have your website built on the Sitecore web content management platform to take advantage of Sitecore’s Digital Marketing capabilities. You can use Sitecore’s analytics platform to reach out to any third-party website and offer more personalized experiences. Now Sitecore says this will work for any digital channel that a company owns, so it could also include communities, mobile websites and other channels, which proves it’s cross-channel approach.
Darren Guarnaccia, chief strategy officer, Sitecore said this about the integration:
Arke’s technology enables our users to bring all of the power of Sitecore’s analytics to any digital channel, regardless of the platform the site is built on. This technology will provide marketers with a complete picture of individual customers, built on data collected from all of their owned channels. We’re excited to partner with Arke to empower marketers to own the experience in even more places.”
There’s not much information on Arke Systems site about its CCE, so I’m trying to get more information on that to help explain the integration better.
More information on CCE: Arke’s Marketing Manager Asia Matos, blogged about CCE in October. In that post he wrote:
CCE extends your Sitecore investment by enlisting all of your web properties (including those not hosted by Sitecore) into a federation of sites. With CCE, you can gather analytics, manage content, and personalize experiences across your entire web presence. Your Sitecore site becomes a 360 degree periscope into all of a visitor’s engagement with your brand.”
It works very similar to an analytics platform where you place tags on all your sites and pages and all traffic, both anonymous and authenticated are tracked. So a visitor’s interaction with one site, can be used to help personalize their experience on another site (thus the “connected customer” approach). CCE also has what’s called a beacon script. This allows you to create content areas on your non-Sitecore web properties which can displayed personalized content coming directly from Sitecore.
This last few partnerships Sitecore announced focused on its e-commerce capabilities – noting integrations with Microsoft (Dynamics CRM), Znode (Multifront) and SMITH (digital commerce), and of course, it recently acquired commerceserver.net. Maybe it has its e-commerce strategy in line and is now focusing on the improvement of digital marketing across channel.
Sitecore is still finalizing pricing, packaging and rollout specifics, for both new and existing customers.
