Starting out with SAS Customer Intelligence 360 we recommend that you set up the right roles and groups so that everyone on your team will know their areas of focus when using the software. This governance will really facilitate how you work as a team and ultimately get the most out of Customer Intelligence 360. Your SAS administrator will have the ability to assign specific roles and groups for users and should regularly review and keep up to date the list of users.      So what differentiates Roles and Groups? Roles provide access to specific menu items and pages in the user interface. For example, a Plan Viewer can view planning items. Roles are cumulative therefore an individual user can be assigned multiple roles.   Groups, introduced in our 19.09 release, simplify user roles as you no longer need to assign roles on a user level. Basically, you can apply an action to several users at the same time. Just like for roles you can have one user be part of multiple groups. If a role is added to a group, all members of that group automatically inherit that role.     Categories of roles to set   What are the key roles I need to have set up, independently of how many people in my team are using Customer Intelligence 360? To understand this we need to differentiate by categories of roles that exist: read-only, edit, configure, administer, publish and default user roles.   Default user roles you do not need to worry about as these are created automatically for new users. These are essentially Viewer roles which will give your users access to the reporting and the insights sections in the interface.   Administer or Publish roles are for what you would consider as “super users” who would be given unrestricted access to create, schedule and publish content. As a SAS administrator you may want to restrict who you give this level of access to, if you even choose that someone other than you will need it.   Configure roles will be useful to assign if you have specific colleagues in your team who focus on adjusting the settings for you, so someone with a more administrative function. If you use Discover specifically you can give someone from your team the task of setting up rules for data collection and just creating events. This person would then be given the role of Discover Admin.   Read-only roles are good to give to team members who just need to look under the hood. For example, a new trainee who is shadowing the team and wants to get familiar with the interface or one of your senior leaders who wants to understand more about what this SAS solution that his budget paid for actually looks like. As mentioned above, by default new users will already be set to view insights and reports, so you may not need to create additional viewer roles.   Edit roles are where you can really specify actions that your team members will take. Depending on the size of your team you can assign roles with very specific tasks or have someone have a broader role allowing them to perform multiple actions across different modules of Customer Intelligence 360, if you are signed up to more than one. If you use multiple modules but have different teams working with each of these, you can also clearly segregate out each user for each module. For example, the Email Designer role will only focus on creating emailing tasks for which you need Engage Email, whereas the Mobile Designer is tasked with creating mobile tasks, only available in Engage Digital.   Events are ubiquitous across the Customer Intelligence 360 modules so as such it can be a great idea to assign the role of Event Designer to one person in your team so that they can focus purely on creating and editing events. Similarly, the Direct Marketing Designer will have a central role in your direct marketing activities, creating and managing the direct marketing tasks. Export File Designer, the latest addition to the available roles in Customer Intelligence 360, will be able to edit or design export templates. If you have existing Direct Marketing Designers they will automatically also be assigned the role of Export File Designer however any new Direct Marketing Designer will not.   Do you have ways of working and roles that you have assigned in your team that have really helped you work efficiently with Customer Intelligence 360? If so, feel free to share more in the comments section.    Cyril Roger Global Customer Success     ... View more

      As a marketeer you are always striving to get closer to your customers, understand better their behaviour so that you can better answer their needs and serve the right message at the right time. With the advent of digital it is now easier than ever to understand your customer’s behaviour and from there to start gathering data which will make your team smarter and take the right actions at the right time. This is where Discover offers so much opportunities. There are so many ways that a visitor can act while visiting your website that there is literally a trove of information just waiting for you to collect and make great use of.   That’s one of the important points, you could jump headfirst in the collection of data and start collecting everything that you can think of but it’s good to first take a step back and reflect on what it is that really matters collecting. Making that initial homework will structure how you approach your data collection, specifically what advanced collection rules you will define in SAS 360 Discover.    💭Through our experience working with customers using SAS360 Discover we think you gather information on the following:   Outline the major conversion points on your site. Think as well about key milestones in the customer journey that you would be looking to track. Define what are the most important pages on your website, what makes these pages so important and what you are trying to understand from customer interaction with these pages. List out any pain points 🤕 you suspect the visitor could face in the customer journey. Then think about what you would want to collect to investigate further that concern Is your Web or UX team planning a redesign and if so, what changes are expected to happen on the site? You could use this opportunity to collect data to add to other sources (such as user testing) to build a case for specific redesign needs Has the business come to you with specific challenges that they are facing or targets that they have for the year? This is an opportunity to translate those into specific data collection in Discover. You should be forward thinking and plan or even start collecting data which may become more valuable to your organisation in the future. This is a tricky one but, just like the above point, it requires you keep your ear to the ground and get a good sense of what other teams in your organization are working on and what goals matter to them. Seasonality 🎅: you know what specific events or moments in the year are important to your organization therefore you can have a think about what behaviour you are expecting from your customers at these times. On top of that you can outline how it differs from normal times and if so, what you need to ensure you are measuring that specific behaviour So now you’ve considered the above points and have answered the ones that matter. The next step is to break these down into a list that you should prioritize, helping you focus on what’s important to your business. 💰📋 To help you create the data collection events in Discover, you could create a spreadsheet with all the information you will need such as domains and path levels to target, specific page elements or page forms to select and types of page events to capture (click, content change, field interaction, form submit or Javascript variable change. You don’t need to go overboard with what information you enter in your spreadsheet as you will generally be able to navigate to the web page and select page elements. It’s good to keep note of what you are capturing. As your library of events grows this will be a good way to keep track of your progress.   You can then go ahead and start setting up the collection of data in Discover. At the time of writing this post you will still be able to this via advanced collection rules, however this will change very soon.   As per a recent post on Communities from Jim Hazen, with the 20.03 release this month advanced collection rules will disappear from the UI and be replaced in the following way: Some events that were configured in the Advanced Collection Rules section of SAS 360 Discover are automatically migrated in Events. These previously configured events continue to work without any changes being required by the user, including Business Process, Goal, Internal Search, Promotion, and Custom Attribute. The remaining items in Advanced Collection Rules were automatically moved to the General Settings > Classification page and continue to work as previously configured, including Page Category, Form, Profile, and View.   Let us know how you are doing on your data collection journey! 🎤 Do you have tried and tested ways of approaching data collection that you would like to share with other members of the community?       ... View more

    If you are a first time user of Customer Intelligence 360 (and not a previous user of our Marketing Automation solution) while you have likely gone through our training and have had great support and mentoring from our Professional Services team during setup, you may still have that little bit of apprehension with getting your first segment map up and running. The beauty with Engage Direct is that it really allows you to create complex segments that you can then export and leverage in any direct marketing activities. As with our other Customer Intelligence 360 modules we are also constantly working on improving the solution to provide you with more functionalities and help you solve your actual business challenges.   It’s likely you will be storing much more data on-premise so you will more often than not want to create a map out of your on-premises data mart. Still, if you know all the data you need is stored in our data hub then it may be quicker to make use of it and create a segment map from the cloud data hub. The data that will be available to use for your on-premise segment will have been identified by your SAS administrator when would have created the information map in SAS Information Map Studio.   Criteria Nodes will be central to define the segments, or groups of people who share similar characteristics, that you are looking to identify. If at one point during the creation of your segment map you need to change the subject level (say from account user to household) you can insert a Map node. Just remember that all nodes downstream of that one will relate to that new subject. Multiple criteria nodes can either be combined with an “AND” node or given to meet certain conditions with an “OR” node. Split nodes will allow you to separate an incoming record into more outputs. A limit node will help you create a specific subset of subjects. Prioritize nodes are useful to rank and de-duplicate subjects of an input node, say when you want to target the top 10 subjects with the highest savings. Process nodes will come into play when you have specific stored processes (likely provided by your IT team) that you want to insert into the segment. Link nodes are powerful as they can be leveraged from another segment map, saving you precious time. Finally, you may want to add export nodes if you need to extract certain segments from your segment map.   Overall, it’s worth playing around with the segment map to familiarize yourself with how to build one and to become comfortable with how each different node works.   Two things worth doing when setting up your nodes is to see if you want to mark them as a segment and as linkable. Marking as a segment will allow you to export them and use in your direct marketing, even if there are more nodes downstream. Marking as linkable will allow you to reuse them in another segment map without starting from scratch. Note you won’t be able to set these in either Export, Link, Split or Prioritize nodes.   You may have specific directions as to what segments need to be created for your company’s marketing activities but it’s worthwhile understanding if some segments will often reappear in upcoming campaigns. If so making them linkable will make your life easier. Similarly, you will need to understand how refined your segments need to be. Most often you will refine them by four types of market segmentation: geographic, demographic, psychographic or behavioral, all dependent on what data you have available in your data mart. The refinement will also depend on what channels you wish to use to target these segments and what messages and creatives are aimed at these segments.   If you have a very well-honed message and very good knowledge of your target audience, you may be able to get strong responses from a smaller but more defined segment. If you are looking to reach a wider group, such as for an awareness campaign or for a brand building exercise, it may be worthwhile to limit the number of criteria you use, to give you a large enough pool of targets to reach out to.   As you progress through the deployment of your campaigns you can then decide to experiment, especially if you launch campaigns frequently you can further refine your segment maps. Monitoring the responses and engagement of these audiences will allow you, with time, to define and crystallize the right segments for your campaigns. As always though it’s important to remember that the segments you target are one part, but the success of your campaign is also down to the medium you are using to reach them and the message you are targeting them with.   Do you have good examples of segments you created with Customer Intelligence 360 that helped you successfully deploy marketing campaigns? If so feel free to share more on these in the comments below.                ... View more

          You may already be gathering insights on searches made on your website, whether from your search marketing agency, internal SEM team or via a tool such as Google Analytics. You may not be aware that CI 360 also provides such information via the Insights section. If correctly set up CI 360 Discover will capture events such as internal searches and it can be worthwhile to look at this information to gather further understanding of the behaviour of visitors on your website.   According to a 2014 study by eConsultancy, reported in a moz.com article, on average 30% of visitors to a site will perform an on-site search. What’s more those who perform on-site searches are twice as likely to convert and more likely to return to the site with the intent to purchase. The conversion rate from people who used on-site search and found what they were looking for is double the average ecommerce conversion rate of the companies involved in the research.   The value is there for your ecommerce and digital marketing teams and CI 360 can help you extract it. Understanding variations in your internal search can impact, amongst other things, what products you decide to showcase and promote on your site, your internal site structure and navigation and even what marketing campaigns you decide to launch.   As you went through your CI 360 training you may have been familiarized with the Insights section, which is accessible right under the Home in the left side menu of the CI 360 interface.     You can use either the search box or search down through the Insights menu in the page to reach the Internal Searches section.         Once there the default will be for the page to show “Quick Fact”. I recommend you adjust it by one of the other duration options in the tabs, with “Monthly” giving you the longest time frame. You can use the sliders at the bottom to focus in on a specific period as by default you will get a monthly period of 2 years. Please note that each graph is independent from each other, so moving the sliders on one graph will not update the information in the other graphs.   The graph at the bottom of the page, “Highest Number of Searches”, is particularly valuable as it will provide you data by actual search term, and you will notably be able to view either all searches or just failed (i.e. searches that did not bring back a result) searches. There are several takeaways you can share in this report with your ecommerce and digital marketing teams:   Are there search terms with a very high level of failed searches or very high failure rates that relate to products that you have recently launched or that have suddenly become popular due to external factors? Do some of the searches have high ratios, leading you to think that you are not presenting the visitor with the right results, which would lead them to leave your site? Look at the average number of pages viewed after a search: digging further into the consumer journey via these searches will help you understand if, for example, this number is low because the visitor has found what he/she wants, or high because he/she has to keep searching until he/she gets to the right page Look at the “Results returned rate” to get an indication of whether some terms are somehow not returning a high enough level, which is a concern especially if they have a high amount of searches   Lastly, you can always export any of the information you find in the graphs on the Insights page. When you hover your cursor over a graph you will see three dots to the right of the graph title.         Just click on that, select “Export data…”, select the columns and options as well as file type and press OK.   Furthermore, if you want to gather more specific information on your internal search you can set up advanced collection rules for this. It’s a great way to gather data on more complex actions around your internal searches. We can go through setting this up in another post.     ... View more