360-degree-experience

š The “360 degree customer experience” is all about the careful management of the end-to-end cycle your specific audience takes, which can vary in different industries and markets. This encompasses everything from User Data, Behavior tracking, Social Media activity, and real-time / historical analytics to create a holistic view of your audience. This can also be used to identify gaps in processes, overlaps of audience behavior and ideally highlight areas that could use improvement or expose weaknesses.

So, how do we get started down this path if you work at a fairly large organization? This task seems daunting and could cross over between departments, making the process even tricker. šStart by gathering information within your organization required for planning the 360 degree experience, which derives from sources typically in different business units.

šAs part of this initial “inventory” step, a comprehensive review of tools (and teams) are necessary. A good starting place would be …

1. Surveying your customers
2. Compile data to reflect customer journeys (Email systems, Sales / CRM Systems, Social Systems, Website Analytics, etc.) and identify user interactions
3. Map Lifecycle steps and begin examining user paths

šSurvey every customer - Satisfaction surveys not only help you instrument a better product, they also help you identify at-risk customers before they leave you. Complaints can be great! They will tell us exactly where our product or overall experience is completely failing. Keep your surveys brief (1-2 questions), and make sure emailed users don’t need to go to a separate 3rd party survey site to complete the form.

* Savvy companies drive all poor ratings directly to an assigned sales or support team for email follow-up. Informing them of upcoming product enhancements, offering discounts or simply letting them know that you’re listening is worth doing. Use positive ratings to identify people for VIP programs or for driving social email promotions!

Compiling Your Data – šTake an in-depth look and reflect on your individual customer journeys (Email systems, CRM Systems, Social Systems, Website Analytics, eCommerce platforms, etc.). Delivering on the 360-degree view is not simply about having a unified database of all activity, but rather being able to pull together the pieces of information that are relevant for a specific customer workflow and specific interaction with your product.

šMapping Lifecycle - Once data is aggregated, its critical to identify areas of strength and weakness. The purpose of the entire 360-degree customer experience mapping is to influence and change institutionalized behavior and activity within your organization.

* Data Scientists and Analyst roles have become more critical in many organizations for this exact purpose, being able to identify not only problem areas, but also identify areas of potential missed opportunity and growth. šData is king. Typically, results of such an internal review and audit can expose weaknesses in unexpected areas.

Now, let’s look at few specific use cases where the Customer Journey Maps could make a difference for you…

šUse Case # 1: Overlapping Initiatives (Sales, Editorial, Marketing)

šAfter detailed review was conducted of our separate sales, editorial and marketing distribution lists between departments using aggregated data collection, it was clear there was abundant overlap of audience between our global divisions (which was a surprise to many). This resulted in spamming of user emails without proper sequence to cross division initiatives, as well as missed opportunity for cross-over sales. New product ideas were generated after seeing some of this unique customer overlap.

šUse Case # 2: Daily Social and Email Activity (Editorial, Marketing, Business Development)š

šIn recent research of aggregated real-time and email analytics for customer profiles, it was uncovered that engagement was flat for standard Newsletter and Social Media traffic for many months with little or no growth. šAfter an in depth A/B test was conducted using aggregated data between email and social media platforms, the user experience was detailed for individual users. It was clear that we had higher open rates and better social traffic growth at an unexpected hours during the day and in the evenings, which resulted in drastic process change.

šUse Case # 3: Loss of Ownership (Sales, Editorial, Marketing, Technology)

šAfter creating a specific “customer journey” for eCommerce products, it was clear there were areas of business that lacked ownership, following up with customers that do not complete the transaction funnel. Key touch points were assigned to specific departments to address areas of inconsistencies (and glitches in customer journeys), simply because no internal team has been tasked with ownership of that element. Journey maps can create clarity around alignment of departments or groups with different stages or key touchpoints in the journey that need addressing.

Reference Materials for Customer Journey Mapping

• šSticky Notes & Whiteboards — for quick and dirty journey mapping where your sources of information/research change rapidly
• šSmaply  (https://www.smaply.com/)— creates digital personas, journey maps, stakeholder mapsš
• šTrello / Mural  —  digital sticky notes and organization tool for online brainstorming, synthesis and collaboration
• šMapovate  (https://www.mapovate.com/) — digital journey mapping

Hope this info has been helpful!

This was a concept that was around for many years for hard-core gamers, with games such Blizzard’s World of WarCraft taking an early lead using the model to expand and grow its audience. Lately, this has been a key factor for any game to survive, with more recent success in games like Mojang’s Minecraft which has a constant stream of updates and enhancements to keep users engaged. This has even grown past the standard PC model, and has been a core factor for iOS and mobile adoption with games like SuperCell’s Clash of Clans, Boom Beach and more recently Clash Royale. Now, this has expanded with console gaming, which traditionally has always kept to the in-game content only model with no updates.   

Popular development studio Rockstar Games announced today a new downloadable expansion for the mega-hit Grand Theft Auto V, releasing on October 4 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The open-world game that’s one of the top sellers in the industry’s history. GTA Online online has generated over $500 million in revenue. Updates such as these on console games keep players engaged, which makes people more likely to spend money on in-game upgrades and features. This new update adds Biker “Clubs” to GTA, which allow teams (of up to two to eight players) to ride with each other, creating more of a social experience. Updates of course will also include new vehicles, weapons, clothing and other small details making it a richer experience.

Clearly, this is a direction all new games must have in mind if they want to keep players engaged and coming back for more. For additional information regarding Video Game Health Benefits, check out this read from our partners at Positive Health Benefits.

hash-tag

I’ve been recently engaged on a few SEO related initiatives and came across inquiries regarding the usage of “hash” symbols (formerly known as the “pound” sign) specifically in URLs and how they affect SEO rankings. Are these characters simply ignored by Google search crawlers, or does this make an impact that people should be aware of? How should these kinds of characters be used on the web? This is a brief description of where and how to implement these across your dynamic web applications.

A hash sign (#) in a URL is referred to as a ‘fragment’. In the past and with many legacy applications, URL fragments have been used to automatically set the browser’s scroll position to a predefined location in the web page, like a standard HTML4 ‘anchor’ link (used on many ‘link-farm style websites and old school Geocities sites). Applied in this manner, a URL refers to a document, then the fragment refers to a specific subsection of that document (or web page).

In recent years, however, this definition changed through the use of major Social NEtworking sites, primarily driven by the popularity and adoption of Twitter. Any information that appears after the first hash symbol in a URL is referred to as the fragment identifier – sometimes also called an anchor tag. By default, the fragment identifier is interpreted only by the local web browser and is typically not passed to the remote web server. For example, the following two links would both be considered requests for the same document by the web server:

• www.samplewebsite.com/colors.html#red
• www.samplewebsite.com/colors.html#blue
• www.samplewebsite.com/colors.html#yellow

Since the fragment identifiers (tags) in the example URLs above signify two different locations in the same page, search engines like Google, Bing, etc., will consider them both to refer to a single search result: www.samplewebsite.com/colors.html

For this reason, it’s important not to use fragments as a way to represent what should instead be different pages. In short, if you want Google to crawl two different pages and index them separately, you’re better off simply using two distinct URLs without fragments. However, in modern implementations, fragments are often used in a different way – to add dynamic functionality to websites and web applications. In this approach, a series of related requests are all processed by the same URL. So, in order to return different variations of the content, parameters are passed via URL fragments. Javascript is then used to interpret the fragment and update only portions of the page that need to change, without the need for a full page or browser refresh. This is typical of AJAX-style applications.

So, the question is, how does Google index distinct content within AJAX style pages? After all, we just said that Google will not consider the fragments in the URLs. The answer is Google has provided a syntax for working around this problem. It’s known as the “hash bang” syntax. By putting an exclamation point immediately after the hash sign, you’re telling Google that the fragments are not used for traditional scroll positioning but instead for loading separate content variations that should be crawled. With that approach, our example URLs with fragments could indeed be crawled and seen by Google. Our example URLs might then look like this:

• www.samplewebsite.com/colors.html#!red
• www.samplewebsite.com/colors.html#!blue
• www.samplewebsite.com/colors.html#!yellow

Remember, if you’re not using this special syntax, analytics reporting systems like Google Analytics may not be configured to track clicks on fragment links in your site. To ensure tracking works, either structure your content with distinct URLs or configure your Google Analytics code to also track fragment clicks.

Here are a few useful links regarding Hash Tags in URLs…

• Character Escaping (Stack Overflow) – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5007352/how-to-escape-hash-character-in-url
• Fragment URLs (HTTP Watch) – https://blog.httpwatch.com/2011/03/01/6-things-you-should-know-about-fragment-urls/

Access to YouTube Music Key will also get for end users premium access to Google Play Music’s over 45 million songs, as well as YouTube’s collection of popular videos. YouTube will be testing these new services on an invitation-only basis similar to rollout of many Google products such as the new Gmail App, Google Wave (ugh), and Google Glass Developers.

This is an industry arena already filled with competition, such as new services from Amazon Prime, Apple iTunes, Pandora, etc. Given the amount of failures in the tech industry with free services that convert to “paid” (remember NYTimes Select!), I wouldn’t be surprised if Google changed this to a free model within the next 12-24 months.