Sitecore’s New Experience Database, Experience Profile

by Barb Mosher Zinck | April 30, 2014 11:56 am

Everyone is talking about big data and getting the 360 degree view of the customer. Today, Sitecore says it has delivered on that goal with its new Experience Database and Sitecore Experience Profile.

Nate Barad, Sitecore’s Director of Product Strategy, provided me with some insights into why this Experience Profile is so important to marketers today. In a nutshell, it seems almost obvious, marketers talk to humans, not devices or IP, and they need insight – all the data they can get on their customers to make their experiences the best they can be.

Barad said that often marketers sacrifice intelligence on visitors because they don’t have the right tools to capture it or they can only get part of the information that is available. The new Experience Database (available as a service), also called xDB, can provide all of that data to the marketer.

Details on the Experience Database

A little detail about the Experience Database:

• It’s a big data system built on MongoDB
• It’s available on premises, or hosted in the cloud in an Azure cloud
• It’s seamlessly connected to the Sitecore Experience Platform (more on this in a minute).

Every connector that Sitecore has in place to day with external services/applications and internal services/apps feed data in the Experience Database automatically.  Sitecore already has a range of out-of-the-box connectors for third party services such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, and Demandware.

For cases where information is disconnected (maybe it’s a commerce system not currently integrated with Sitecore), custom feeds can be created. Sitecore is looking at a number of non-Sitecore experiences that could be integrated with the xDB. (Also, Sitecore 7.5 includes some new third-party tracking tags that will also help pull additional info in).

So what do you do with the massive Experience Database of customer information? Having the intell is great, but what can you do with it?

The Sitecore Experience Profile

You need to make that data actionable. As Barad clearly notes, it’s not enough to know who someone is. You need to know who that person is to you. Without a service like Experience Database, marketers would use tools that would give them a historical view of a customer, they would get trends, but they were often able to identify, say, their most profitable customers or know how to interact with them.

Historical information is great, but today it’s also all about real-time experiences (or as Sitecore likes to say “in the moment”). Experience Database feeds into the new Sitecore Experience Profile giving you immediate insights at the individual level and allows you to quickly figure out what the next best action with that customer will be.

The xDB has the intelligence capability to pull together different identities of a single person into a single profile.

Consider the customer who tweets something negative about your company. You’ll want to know who that person is to you, and how important that person is.  Not that you shouldn’t necessarily to respond to all your customers in a timely manner, but based on who that customer is (are they a top customer?), you might want to ensure certain special actions are taken.

In addition, you can compare profiles and create rules automatically that will do something with similar profiles (maybe the issue the customer had is something similar customers will have and you want to nip it in the bud before things get out of hand).

The idea, says Barad is that you want to build the relationship, so you expand the profile at every angle. Different groups in your organization might look at them, it’s not likely a marketer has time to sit down and review each profile.

The Experience Profile can also be used for offine events, making other applications smarter.

This is very much that 1-1 relationship marketers know they need to develop, but struggle to understand how. Barad said that from their research, this capability has been demanded not just by the C-Suite, but also from tactical field marketers. It’s this relationship building that builds lifetime customers – the ones every organization dreams of having.

The Experience Profile has its own dedicated interface to the Sitecore Experience Platform. So you can do more than just look at this profiles, you can use it to build customize experiences for your customers.

Building Lifetime Value is the Goal

The Sitecore Experience Database and Experience Profile are great additions to the Sitecore Experience Platform. They fall in line with everything we have been hearing from the CXM provider for a few years now and that its CSO, Darren Guarnaccia discussed with me in January about the Connected Customer:

Guarnaccia lists four areas where Sitecore is focused:

1. Collect Data – he says everyone is doing this well
2. Connect It – thread all this information against human beings
3. Analyze It – Report, analyze
4. Utilize It – put it to work, make it actionable, usable

Sitecore will do a little of all of these things. It will build a better system to collect data – anywhere your customers are; it is improving connectivity across channels –ramping up the ability to connect data across any channel; it is revamping its analytics, creating the next generation; and it will make data usable and actionable, in-context to where you need to go make the changes.

But Sitecore is not alone in its goal to create that 360 degree view of the customer, or to build marketing experience profiles. Adobe announced its own Marketing Profile last month during its annual Summit in Utah.  Called the Master Marketing Profile, it is a single view of the customer across all the Marketing Cloud solutions, and according to Loni Kao Stark, customers will notice more relevant, personalized experiences, while having their privacy respected at the same time. I may need to do a comparison of the two, not to point out a best one, but to see how CXM providers are building these profiles and integrating them with their experience platforms.

Webtrends is another example providing its Big Data exploration tool and its Lifetime Streams solution. In Webtrends case, they don’t provide the experience platform, but instead integrate with CXM providers to make the best use of the actionable, real-time analytics they have.

This is where CXM platforms need to go. This is the next step in building better experiences, and I know there are companies out there ready to put these tools in place. What I’d like to see is what a sample strategy/implementation plan would look like. If you have one, let me know.

 

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