Site Intelligence10 Steps To Integration Success

Want a 3D view of customer behavior onLine, onDevice and inStore?

We’ll help. Here’s 10 key stages:

1. Get board-level sponsorship and build a team.

It is critical that ownership of the multi-channel strategy resides at board level. Approval of the budget and plan is not enough, there needs to be ownership and advocacy at board level too.

A multi-departmental team with strong leadership and the authority to change the business will be required to make multi-channel integration a reality and a commercial success. There will be push-back from the various silos that currently exist in the business and which have their own procedures, business systems and marketing strategies. Opening these up around a common architecture is critical to success.

2. Set objectives about 'what the business wants to achieve'.

There may be clear objectives for this. For example, a vehicle insurance organization migrating more business online from an expensive call center operation, or a mail order company moving to a series of smaller 'niche catalogs' targeting customers with a specific buyer profile, with fulfillment through an online interface and offers sent through email campaigns.

Other objectives may be simply responding to consumer demand for choice in order and fulfillment channel, or simply trying to maintain market share through increased reach and convenience.

One thing is clear – the clearer the objectives, the greater the chance of success.

3. Understand how multi-channel the organization can be.

A pure play online retailer, such as Amazon, will never build a high street infrastructure and high street retailers, such as Tesco, will never sell purely online.

The key for high street retailers is to shape the business correctly (hence the rise of the Director of Multi-channel Operations in most large retailers) so that the online presence enhances the high street offering, increasing sales across the business, rather than cannibalizing store sales through an internet channel. Your online business must also not only be measured by online sales, but also by the sales that it instigates across other channels, and vice-versa. The online presence may not even be transactional, therefore all conversion will happen in another channel. However, very few purchasers of digital cameras, for example, will purchase without doing any online research. This is the time to get your message out there and measure whether it works.

Store loyalty cards, which can be used on and offline, are excellent sources of data for tracking this. Interestingly, some high street retailers with transactional websites, now give online purchasers vouchers which can only be redeemed in store, whilst others give high street purchasers discounted e-vouchers, which can only be redeemed online.

Organizations with clear multi-channel vision, and the ability to execute that vision, have been surprised at near instantaneous take-up of their model with customers requesting even more technology-led promotions.

4. Audit your channel data (customers and orders).

Where it is held? How easy it is to access? What level of data integrity and detail do you have? Most organizations do not have a lack of data ... they have a lack of visibility and access to that data.

Customer-facing have traditionally developed with separate growth profiles and separate management structures and as a result the core data that drives a true multi-channel strategy has been locked in a variety of back-end systems, making it either too complex, too costly or just plain impossible to build a multi-channel view of the business.

It is critical to audit all the data assets of the organization, establishing the ease of access to it, how and when it is refreshed and updated, and establishing its value.

Once this is achieved, any gaps should be identified and either statistical sampling methods used to close these or new systems developed to capture this if it is critical to success. Also, use solutions that work hard to provide data integrity and multiple integration keys between online and offline data in order to gain a truer and more accurate customer record. Too many solutions track activity either on web-cookie value or through the capture of a log-in ID. However, a solution that does both (and more) will not only remove the need to over-write one with the other, but also provide greater chance and accuracy in cross matching customer records across multiple channels.

5. Cleanse & de-dupe the core data assets.

Cleanse & de-dupe your data and federate into a core data store. To drive change and value within the organization, data must be placed into a flexible, ‘multi-channel data mart’ where it can be accessed and profiled to mine the value.

This extraction, translation and loading process (ETL) needs to be automated to the highest degree as manual processes will complicate, slow and corrupt the process.

To a major degree, the success of the insight and value the project is dependent upon how well the ETL process works.

6. Profile the data against key attributes.

To build increasingly sophisticated segmentations it’s vital to profile the data against key attributes.

Using data discovery and analytics tools which sit on top of the core data store, profiles and segmentations can be built which give huge insight into the channel activity of customers.

7. Communicate with the relevant marketing teams.

Communicate the analysis, segmentations and profiles to the relevant marketing teams. The profiled data now becomes 'active' and forms the basis of marketing campaigns. Depending on the profiles, this can be utilized for customer acquisition, retention or re-activation campaigns if customers have lapsed and become inactive.

Understanding the customer from a unique and common architecture allows the direct and indirect effect of all campaigns to be understood and the likelihood of each customer to respond and purchase can be calculated. Over time, an inventory of all marketing campaigns by channel will be built, allowing the effectiveness and 'return on marketing spend' to be calculated for each channel and each campaign, allowing the multi-channel marketing budget to become highly effective and efficient.

8. Measure, Analyze, Report, Question, Refine.

Make sure that the effectiveness of multi-channel integration is measured against the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that drive the business and demonstrate success. Marketing and/or business analysts should analyze the results and search for insight within the data.

Sending these KPI’s and reports across the organization will force questions to be asked around many of the findings, allowing the process to be refined and become ever more meaningful and valuable to the business.

Many organizations also augment internal analysis with the services of specialist marketing organizations to interpret and understand the data. These organizations can bring huge insight and are impartial, not carrying the history of their organization, as many employees would do.

9. Learn, Listen, Change.

The growth trajectory of multi-channel integration means that as fast as one organization finds a unique opportunity - such as click and collect; order online, return to store; or online redemption of offline offers - other organizations will copy it.

Success in the future will be based on technological change being used to respond to consumer demand for convenience and translating this into major revenue opportunities for the organization, particularly turning as many single channel shoppers into multi-channel shoppers as possible.

This will be the catalyst for success in the multi-channel future.

10. Avoid aggregated data.

What might seem insignificant now may be critical in the future. Organizations need to capture and retain all the detail ... and not compromise through using simple reporting solutions Most web reporting solutions capture either a limited amount of the data or activity, or sample the data thereby reducing either the number of visitors that are reported on, or reducing the history that is provided. Whichever is the case, this only gets worse the larger your online presence is. If your CRM system deleted 75% of your customer records arbitrarily because it didn't have the power to report on them, or if all customer activity prior to last month was deleted for the same reason, how would you feel? This is exactly what most web analytics solutions do, and if not then all they capture is a very small snapshot at a visitor record, thereby meaning you have to choose what's important. Rather than being limited in this respect Site Intelligence captures, records, stores and provides access to everything that the online visitor does, including wherever possible anything that identifies the visitor and therefore offers greater opportunity to link this to cross-channel behavior. Without this capability some serious compromises need to be considered, not least of which is a severely reduced capability to provide a multi-channel customer or visitor view.

About Site Intelligence

Site Intelligence creates, installs and supports multi-channel customer intelligence systems. The company has worked with leading retail and financial institutions.

Our mission is to help organizations gain commercial advantage from a 3D view of their customers. By recording customer behavior onLine, onDevice and inStore, we help

companies to anticipate customer needs and provide outstanding service.

Site Intelligence supports customers with consulting, installation and training.

We have three differentiating technologies:

VBIS multi-channel database.VBIS uses standard SQL technology and comes with sophisticated APIs that enable it to be used with any other EPOS, call center, ecommerce or other platforms for a truly multi-channel solution. And with multi-server processing capabilities, VBIS is enterprise-class and completely scalable.

Specialized reporting tools.Site-Intellegence has developed a range of report generators and specialized modules which enable detailed customer intelligence to be extracted from the VBIS multi-channel database. These range from executive dashboards and Excel plugins through to detailed ecommerce, sales correlation and visitor location analysis tools.

Server-driven Infinity Tags.Our Infinity Tags are easily installed by webmasters, typically reducing the web tagging overhead to days instead of months. Once installed, our Infinity Tags collect a wealth of data about customer behavior. And because they are server controlled, future changes to your anlytic requirements need not involve the web design team.

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