Sitecore

The Austin .NET meetup (a meetup.com group) met at a business called Engagency which does work within the sphere of "customer intelligence" (will explain, don't worry) and a Ben Bartlett of Engagency gave a talk on what Engagency does with Sitecore, an ASP.NET CMS which has a few surprising tricks up its sleeve that I've certainly not seen in working with DotNetNuke and Ektron. Sitecore has a capacity for recording clicks for unknown visitors and collecting this data into a record set about which certain assumptions may be made. The clicking upon one banner instead of another may be telling of a user's interests and similarly which pages beyond the home page are browsed may comparably be illuminating/insightful. Clearly, at an online storefront it is a goal for the keepers to make sales from visitors, but upstream of those acts there is another hurdle that must be cleared for a customer to make it all the way through the sales funnel to a conversion. A customer must transition from an unknown visitor to a known visitor. The moment at which a party enters his/her contact information in a form does not necessarily have to occur at the same moment that party is ready to check out and give credit card information. Ben did not say this out loud, but his talk sort of had a subtext suggesting that this may not be the best approach and that potential sales may be falling out of the funnel without a more refined means of engaging with potential clientele. For example, at http://sitecoredemo.namics.com/ which is a demo Sitecore app for a travel agency dubbed "Jetstream" the process from beginning to end through the sales funnel might look like so: an unknown visitor finds Jetstream online and lands at its homepage

1. the IP address and geolocation (which is only so accurate) is recorded for the unknown visitor (this is the only implicit data we have of our guest so far)
2. the visitor stays instead of abandoning the site and he/she clicks about some
3. based upon a click on an advertisement for the Caribbean, Sitecore's analysis of the metrics within the implicit data we've gathered on our unknown guest tell us he/she is closest to fitting the persona of "Sally the Sunbather"
4. in a face-to-face, technology-free conversation one might listen first and then respond, and in drawing a parallel here in our workflow we have listened to implicit data up to the point that we know we are talking to "Sally the Sunbather" and we next respond by slanting the banners and advertisements which appear at Jetstream's site to be tailored to Sally
5. we get our Sally to visit a "let-us-keep-you-updated-on-specials" form slanted to Sallyesque interests and our Sally provides us with explicit data by completing the form (name, email address, etc.)
6. we now have explicit data on Barbara Simmons which is superior to the implicit data we had on "Sally" as Barbara Simmons has become a known user, though we may not have come this far without attention to the implicit data
7. at this point we are next walking through what Ben called an "engaging plan" in which we ask "where would you like to go?" followed by "would you like to look at flights to there?" followed by "would you like to book a flight?" as we chitchat our way to a conversion
8. last step: Barbara Simmons makes a credit card transaction for an airplane ticket

The magic of Sitecore is that it records the implicit data of clicks here-and-there (customer intelligence) and tries to use it advantageously in the name of transitioning unknown visitors into known visitors.