Last month, I wrote about when we attended Sitecore Symposium 2014 in Barcelona in September. Here are a few more reflections that we brought home from the event. We should stop making assumptions about content, and test more. How gamification can be positive for customer loyalty and engagement. And for those who have a need to manage and analyse external web sites as it was an ordinary Sitecore site at the same place, FXM will be fully integrated in Sitecore 8.
More and more people discover e-commerce, which means that it will be more and more obvious that it is not optimal to present the same content for everyone. You could benefit to aiming and targeting information more to certain groups of customers.
Test more
But how do you know that the content you wrote works? It might even be worse, than an improvement. If you look at the tools that are available today, Sitecore stands out with its support for this. Project Skynet is the code name for the thing Sitecore found out is the best way to work with content. We should stop making assumptions about content, and start testing more. Project Skynet integrates machine learning techniques in the test framework, so you can identify trends. By saving large amounts of data, the system can learn what works, and what doesn’t, as well as suggesting different optimizations that the editor can make.
By using gamification for content creating, the system challenges you to make assumptions how good or bad you think the result will be, to later present the result so you can follow up and decide how to move on. This is done so that you don’t have to guess what works best, but instead knowing. Gamification means that you add different forms of game components to your content, in a context that normally isn’t connected to games, to increase engagement and customer loyalty. There are several examples where you are offered to be in a lottery in exchange of reviewing a product that you ordered.
Managing and Analysing External Web Sites
A news that will be fully integrated in Sitecore 8 is Federated Experience Manager (FXM). FXM adds personalization, test, and analysis that is offered by DMS to external sites that are not Sitecore. This could be interesting for customers that already have an e-commerce site, or web site on different systems, or have several sub-sites that are not handled in Sitecore already. There are now functions to add content from Sitecore with a simple string of code on the other sites and pages, similar to the one for Google Analytics for example, to connect them to Sitecore. By using FXM, the editors can configure the content at external sites, target content and personalization in the same way as it was an ordinary Sitecore site, from just one place. You can of course use the entire Sitecore DMS to handle statistics for visitors.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CMS
Sitecore has an impressive position in this years’ Magic Quadrant for CMS that is presented by Gartner. According to Gartner, Sitecore is in the lead, with the best ability to realize its vision for CMS and CXM companies. Adobe is slightly better, but only in getting their product out. Sitecore was early in embracing Customer Experience, and in Sitecore 8 Experience Platform, this is taken another step further.