Stop that leaky funnel! Capture customers impacted by IT errors into Adobe Campaign

A little while ago, I wrote a blog explaining the importance of capturing all IT errors related to a service you deliver to a customer.  

I used the example of a hotel booking site.  And talked about the number of times as users of digital services we encounter errors that are never recognised by the organisation.  For a marketing person, this is known as a leaky funnel.  

In my discussions with customers over the past year, it is becoming clear whatever their industry that they are seeing the customer experience of their digital services as one of the primary differentiators for them in the marketplace.

You’ll often now see “NPS” on dashboards within IT teams that develop and run customer-facing mobile and web applications. NPS is your Net Promoter Score - how likely you are to recommend a product or service to a peer.  

Application failures play a big part in the user experience, yet people in the Line of Business (sales, marketing etc.) have very little visibility into what is going on in IT.  Why?  Because traditional IT tools have not been able to meet their needs.

To make matters worse, for a single customer journey, we encounter more and more digital touchpoint or services, all of which need to deliver quality to ensure overall good user experience.  

Consider a stay in that hotel you’ve always wanted to visit. The hotel experience could be ruined by the fact you couldn’t connect to the wifi, despite getting the room with the best view.

It is the machine-data generated by the applications, servers and network devices that underpin these services that binds this experience together.  Not only to detect the errors, but monitor the full user journey.  No other source of data would be able to do this.  In fact, I would go as far to say in today’s world it is imperative for any business to have access to this data – it is the platform for IT, the business and security to work in harmony.  

Here’s a good example of using machine-data to improve customer experience, reduce customer churn and align to the business.

I’m using a hotel-booking service developed by Romain.  We collect the machine data generated by this service into Splunk, including end user performance, application logs, system events and flows from an Enterprise Service Bus.

In some cases, there are timeout errors whilst searching for a hotel.  Through a Splunk alert, we will catch these errors and trigger an action in the great marketing automation solution Adobe Campaign.

Marketing automation solutions allow marketing professionals to create campaigns, and define workflows for how you wish to target a segment of people.  For example, you may wish to automate sending your contacts a very personalised message via email. Depending on whether they open the email you may add an action for a letter to be sent to them by the post and then a very targeted banner on your site when they next log in.

Fortunately, I have a good friend that works with Adobe and he helped me configure the integration and define a workflow.  It’s super easy.

Using Custom Alert Actions I use the Adobe API to trigger the workflow.  I just pass an identifier to the customer that’s on my site, the name of the workflow and the hotel he was searching (all available in the machine-data).

The rest is down to Adobe:  It will enrich the identifier with more information about the customer, then it will send a very personalised email to the customer to apologise for the error including a discount coupon and finally it will suggest trying to book the same hotel or suggest other hotels if there is no availability.

Here is my workflow in Adobe :

To find out more about to improve the quality of the services you deliver, accelerate the time to investigate incidents, catch problems you never even knew existed and understand the business impact of outages attend our webinar “Improve the quality of your business services through data-driven and customer-centric insights with Splunk ITSI” on Tuesday 25th April at 10:30 GMT.  Or in French “Vos données machines et Splunk ITSI, la clef pour comprendre l’expérience digitale de vos clients” on Tuesday 18th April at 10:00 CET

To know how much a critical IT outage costs your business compared to your peers try out our 3-minute calculator at http://ciecalculator.com (English), http://ciecalculator.fr (French), http://ciecalculator.de (German).

We’re just scratching at the surface of what we could do with Adobe, I’m just using a simple example for the time being. To know more - ping me a message at ayme@splunk.com

Thanks for reading. 

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Thanks!
Guillaume Ayme