Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model – Stage 2 – Radiate

In this post we will focus on Radiate Stage which is Stage 2 of Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model. It is a second stage of “Attract” phase.

What does it mean to be on “Radiate stage”?

I will start here with the definition from “Connect” book.

In Stage 2, Radiate, marketing organizations are more concerned with reaching their customers through the appropriate channels.

It means that on this level you have started to think about your customers. You do not focus only on your offer and products – you understand that you have to know your clients better. That change in your understanding indicates your next actions – work on segmentation of your clients and accessibility on all channels.

Omnichannel

Omnichannel sounds like something ridiculously complicated but if you will check what exactly it means you will be surprised how easy it is.

Wikipedia defines Omnichannel in following way:

Omnichannel is a cross-channel business model that companies use to increase customer experience. ….. bla bla bla ….. including channels such as physical locations, FAQ webpages, social media, live web chats, mobile applications and telephone communication. Companies that use omnichannel contend that a customer values the ability to be in constant contact with a company through multiple avenues at the same time.

In one sentence: always be there where your clients are! If you know/think that your customers use Facebook – you should be there. If you know/think that your customers would use mobile app to know you offer better – you should give them mobile app.

What is cool in Sitecore – no matter which channel you will pick from the list – Sitecore already have a solution for you!

Check this site for more details: http://www.sitecore.net/products/sitecore-experience-platform/cross-channel-delivery

Segmentation

Because you already know that you should not present the same things for all customers you have to split people for segments. There is no one simple answer for question “how split customers for segments” because every group of customers is different – you probably know your customers better than I do,  so you will find the way to split them.

What can determine simple segments assignment:

  • gender
  • age
  • location
  • selected goods
  • campaigns
  • registration details
  • many more other things

You probably noticed that I wrote “simple segments” – I did that because on this level you still know only groups of your customers not concrete people (You will know them better later).

What I have to do to move to the next stage?

Next step for you is “Stage 3 – Align”. In next blog post I will describe details but for now you should be aware that you have solid basis and you are ready to “Align digital initiatives with strategic and marketing Objectives”

 

Please keep in mind that this article is just an overview - later, in next articles or in brand new series I will prepare "deep dive" into digital maturity.

Stay with me, on my blog and learn more together!

Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model – Stage 1 – Initiate

In this post we will focus on Initate Stage which is Stage 1 of Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model. It is a first stage of “Attract” phase.

What does it mean to be on “Initiate stage”?

I will start here with the definition from “Connect” book.

In the Initiate stage, organizations use a ‘brochure site’ presence on the web with email campaign capabilities and web analytics

In other words everyone is on this stage as long as has a website – especially when you have Sitecore. The second background of it, is the fact that you probably focus on your products/services rather than on your clients. You use email campaigns to inform clients about new items in store or just about promotions.

Because you still do not know your customer you send the same information to all your customers – it means that some of them can treat your marketing messages as a SPAM – it is bad. You will learn later about possible improvements.

It is worth to mention That companies which are in the first stage usually we do not exist on social channels and Their websites are not mobile friendly.

Analytics

In Sitecore you have built in analytics features and even more because you have xDB which can provide you more information about your users than for example Google Analytics.

Many companies have decided to use Google Analytics parallel with Sitecore xDB and others analytics tools – it is not a bad idea because many tools provides different scope of features. It is good to know and understand how tools can complement each other.

Here you can read valuable article about it: click 

If you are in initiate phase you probably only gather traffic data with Google Analytics and you maybe have installed xDB but you do not try to identify and know better your customers.

What is possible? Check videos on this website: click

Email Campaigns

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post – you use emails as a way of communication with your customers. From time to time you send bigger campaigns. You can use external mass mailing providers or Sitecore builtin Email Experience Manager (EXM – click for more information).

You should noticed that at this point you send the same messages to all your clients. For example if your products are clothes you will send promotion with bow-ties to all woman and man in your database – it is not a good way of selling – you should start think about segmentation and send different personalized messages for different groups of people.

At some point you will notice that there is a lot of work to do, when you have to work on segments manually – you can change that with Sitecore.

What I have to do to move to the next stage?

Next step for you is “Stage 2 – Radiate”. In next blog post I will describe details but for now you should be aware that you need a change.

Before you will move faster you have to be there where your customers are, so your website should be correctly displayed on mobile devices and you have to exist on Social Media channels because in the future you will use data gathered from them.

 

Please keep in mind that this article is just an overview - later, in next articles or in brand new series I will prepare "deep dive" into digital maturity.

Stay with me, on my blog and learn more together!

Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model

For last few months I was looking for some free time to get into the “Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model”. Now I have found some time which I can spend on learning new stuff.

I have decided to prepare few posts about “Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model” but from technical person point of view. Why? Because in my opinion it is really important to understand why we (developers) spend so much time on preparing personalized Sitecore components which use xDB data.

When we are talking about Digital Maturity in context of Sitecore we should remember about many Sitecore publications and SBOS team.

Do you know this images?

Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Chart from http://www.sitecore.net/getting-started/maturing-digitally/cx-maturity-model

Customer Experience Maturity Model

Chart from http://www.connecttheexperience.com/CX-Maturity-Assessment

On presented charts you are able to check all seven steps to Digital Maturity.

But what exactly Digital Maturity is? Well, in easy words we can say that Digital Maturity is a point on time in which you use all possible ways to know your clients and you serve to them personalized content on all possible channels.

If you want to check on which stage is your company currently, you can try to put your data into form on this page: http://www.connecttheexperience.com/CX-Maturity-Model

But if you have not seen that before you probably will have some problems with understanding of the results. So stay with me, here on my blog and remember :

YOU SHOULD NOT TRY TO SKIP OVER THE STAGES, YOU SHOULD MOVE THROUHG ALL OF THEM STEP BY STEP

I will try to write about all maturity stages with easy to understand examples – so follow my next articles.

Sitecore MVP 2017 – Technology

Yes! I have been awarded with Sitecore MVP!
I was working on it for last year and you know what – it is great that Sitecore noticed that in Poland people work hard for Sitecore Community.

In 2016 we had in Poland only one Sitecore MVP (Adam Najmanowicz – greetings!) but in this year Sitecore has distinguished three more people:
– Radek Kozłowski
– Alan Płócieniak
– and me

What is cool in being Sitecore MVP – I don’t have too much to write about it for now, but as I read in internal mailing from Sitecore in next few weeks all new Sitecore MVPs will recieve access to some internal stuff like pre-release versions of Sitecore and etc.

If you want to know how to become a Sitecore MVP and why it is worth to work with Sitecore, you should see my presentation from Sitecore Community Poland – “Find your own path with Sitecore”

Hopefully you will like my thoughts – if yes then you definitely should subscribe Sitecore Community Poland YouTube channel

What next?

I had a goal to become a Sitecore MVP. Now when I am Sitecore MVP I’m looking for new challenge – maybe I will try prove that it is possible to migrate from Sitecore Developer to Sitecore Digital Strategist? We will see soon – I promise!
More about Sitecore MVP program you can find here: Sitecore MVP

PowerShell – Stage 2

In this part of PowerShell topic I will show you how to create IIS website and unzip Sitecore into the new site directory.

Set site name

Before we will do a real job we have to define name of our new site. We can ask user in console to set the value. This code will prompt for name:

As result we will have name saved in variable $nameProvidedByUser.

Stop IIS

Because we have to add new ApplicationPool, create new IIS Site, sometimes also override some values in confiugration – it is better to stop our local instance of IIS before we will start.

We can do this with script:

After that definition we have to just call our function with command “IIS–Stop”

Do some real work – define/copy/run

Ok, for now we have defined name and stopped IIS instance. We are ready to do some real work.

Run following command and at the end you will have ready to work IIS site and copied Sitecore files inside web root.

We have here code for:

  • unpacking ZIP files
  • changing the structure of unpacked files
  • creation of IIS AppPool
  • creation of IIS Site
  • creation of settings for bindings


But what exactly this command will do? Here you have explanation.

Inside this block of code we use some functions which were prepared before.

Add host to Windows file

If we want to define new site in our environment we also should add new definition in windows hosts file. We can do this with following script:

Start IIS

Because we have in plan to stop our IIS we also should have a script to start it again.

We can do this with following function:

Select version of Sitecore

Probably you will have more than one version of Sitecore in your files system – it means that would be nice to have an option to select which version of Sitecore should be copied into our web root. We can provide that feature with code:

What’s next?

In next part of PowerShell fun I am going to refactor code and set some settings like:

  • permissions
  • database connection strings

If you want to check how current version works you can checkout (and later also participate) code from my public repository on GitHub : PowerShell-automation