Sitecore 9 includes the ability to capture non-web interactions and store them in xDB. This post describes Sitecore interactions and strives to get the marketer thinking about how to use them to track non-web areas of the customer journey.
A Sitecore interaction is a pretty technical element of the overall xConnect model. I’ll break it down for the marketer. An interaction is an activity that:
Can be associated with a contact,
Can be associated with a channel, campaign or goal,
Can have an engagement value,
Can be triggered by another system.
Examples of interactions could include:
A CSR phone conversation that’s tracked in a CRM,
A retail purchase that’s tracked in a POS,
Engagement with a native mobile app,
Using any type of external web service, application, IoT device.
The use case for this post is a fitness event interaction for U.S. Masters Swimming, a client of ours. USMS members can track their pool swim activity by using a Swim.com fitness watch or mobile app. Members link their USMS account with Swim.com. Once they do that, their swim activity is sent to Sitecore as an interaction. That interaction has a payload of swim data, that includes date & time, the swim distance & duration, swim pace, club and whether the swim resulted in a personal record. At the end of the swim, all this data makes its way to xDB, via the Sitecore xConnect API.
The member’s swim activity is now visible in the Experience Profile. In this case, swim activity is a great proxy for member engagement. After all, the mission of USMS is to get adults to swim.
A set of swim workout and personal record interactions in a member’s Experience Profile
Think about how many of your customer journey activities occur outside of the website. And, think about the value of having more and more of those data points included with your online customer activity. Little by little, we get closer and closer to that golden record of the customer.