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dCS Product Overview
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Chapter 9
CS-Engage: Sample Implementation
CyberMovieCentral wants to increase sales in The Movie Vault through targeted marketing. This chapter explains how they use CS-Engage to deliver specific product recommendations for specific customers and to run promotions. The following people are relevant to the CS-Engage implementation:
After Marco and Archie finish planning, they will implement the CS-Engage enhancements to the site, performing the following tasks:
Set Up Visitor Data Create Recommendations Set Up the Workflow Create Promotions Perform Ongoing Maintenance
Set Up Visitor Data
The team starts by defining visitor data. Specifically, the team must do the following:
Define Visitor Attributes
Archie and Marco hold a series of meetings to define the kind of data they want to gather about visitors to CyberMovieCentral. After coming to agreement, Archie defines the visitor attributes shown in the following table. These attributes hold the data that Marco wants to collect about the site's visitors. The site will gather this information when users register.
Table 15: Visitor Attributes
Segment the Visitors
Marco fills out GUI-based forms to create visitor segments. He creates many segments, two of which are detailed in the following table:
Table 16: Visitor Segments
Code Visitor Registration Pages
Archie's team uses CS-Engage XML tags to collect and store the data in the dCS database. They use JavasScript to validate the input.
When the site "goes live," visitors will register and CS-Engage will assign the visitors to their appropriate segments. Later, CS-Engage will provide customized promotions and recommendations based on these segments.
Create Recommendations
The team takes the following steps to implement recommendations:
1. The team makes plans.
2. Archie codes templates.
3. Marco names and configures recommendations.
4. Marco rates the importance of each asset to each segment.
The Team Makes Plans
Archie and Marco meet to plan the merchandising messages they want to display on CyberMovieCentral. They decide to support the following recommendations:
- A "New Products" recommendation that lists products entered into the catalog during the previous seven days.
- A "Monthly Specials" recommendation that lists products marked with the "Monthly Specials" product group. Marco will periodically assign overstocked products to this product group.
- A "Cross-Sell" recommendation that lists the DVDs configured to have a cross-sell relationship with the DVD that is currently displayed. Marco needs to determine which products are related to each other.
Archie Codes Templates
Archie and his programmers use XML tags to code the following recommendation templates:
Table 17: Recommendation Templates
Marco Names and Configures Recommendations
Marco uses the CS-Engage recommendation forms to configure the three recommendations shown in the following table. He assigns the appropriate template to the appropriate recommendation.
Table 18: Recommendations
New ProductsHomePageRecsMonthly SpecialsCategoryPageRecsCross-SellProductPageRecs
Marco Assigns Segment Ratings
Marco uses GUI-based forms to rate how important each DVD subcategory is to each segment. This value is called a segment rating; a portion of Marco's ratings is shown in the following table:
Table 19: Segment Ratings
The "In Segment Rating" column holds values between 0 and 100. Each value represents the interest that visitors in that segment have for DVDs in the specified subcategory. For example, the table shows that Marco rates Slasher Films as being very unappealing (5) to Classic Movie Lovers but highly appealing (95) to Horror Movie Fiends. Consequently, CS-Engage would probably almost never recommend Slasher Films to Classic Movie Lovers, but would be very likely to recommend Slasher Films to Horror Movie Fiends.
The "Out of Segment Rating" column also holds values between 0 and 100. Each value represents the interest that visitors who are not in the designated segment have for DVDs of the specified subcategory. For example, Marco rates Westerns as being moderately appealing (50) to visitors who are not Classic Movie Lovers. (Don't forget that Marco created many segments; however, for the sake of simplicity, the table shows only two segments.)
Marco Assigns Confidence Percentages
Marco uses GUI-based forms to assign confidence percentages to various DVDs. The following table shows a small subset of the confidence percentages he assigned to Slasher Films. CS-Engage will use a combination of rating and confidence values to make cross-sell recommendations. Based on the Confidence percentages in the following table and the In Segment Ratings in
Table 19 , CS-Engage appears likely to recommend Stingin' in the Rain to visitors from the Horror Movie Fiends segment.
Table 20: Confidence Relationships for Cross-Sell Recommendations
Set Up the Workflow
After the recommendations are configured, the team is ready to implement a promotion for the launch of The Movie Vault. However, they decide that promotions should be controlled by workflow to make sure that unedited copy or unapproved discounts are not published to the public site by mistake. To implement a workflow for promotions, Alice the administrator creates the following workflow roles:
She uses the following workflow states:
She creates the following workflow steps:
- Send for Approval -- A marketer performs this step; then a promotion is ready to be reviewed. The promotion is assigned to the people performing the Product Manager role.
- Reject for Product or Price Error -- The Product Manager can reject the promotion. It is sent back to the Marketer.
- Send to Publisher -- The Product Manager must approve the promotion and perform the Send to Publisher step for the promotion to be published.
Create Promotions
To create promotions, developers and designers use the XML or JSP methods to design and code templates for recommendations. They create recommendations and then assign the appropriate template to each one.
Marco does not write code to create promotions; he uses the CS-Engage GUI and fills out forms that define the following settings:
- The segment members who qualify for the promotion and the products to promote.
- The discount offered and the duration of the promotion (for one month, while supplies last, and so on).
- The text or graphics (or both) that appear on the rendered site page that notifies visitors of the promotion.
- The location of the notification. Promotions are displayed on the public site pages by replacing the recommendation that would normally appear.
To test the CS-Engage promotion interface before allowing other marketers to start using it, Marco creates a Halloween promotion. Following the procedures in the dCS User's Guide, he creates the following test promotion:
Table 21: The Test Promotion
NameDurationDiscountSegmentsLocation
Perform Ongoing Maintenance
After all the development work is done and the site is published, Marco continues to maintain the site by performing the following tasks:
- Identify new segments and create segment definitions for them
- Assign confidence percentages for new movies
- Manage the Monthly Highlights recommendations
- Determine the need for new recommendations
- Run promotions
- Analyze the purchase records and determine whether their merchandising strategies are a success
Summary
When Vicky the visitor returns to The Movie Vault, she notices the list of new movie titles on the home page right away. When she clicks on a title in the list of new movies, the next page displays not only a description of the movie she selected, but also another list of movies similar to the one that she selected.
When Vicky visits The Movie Vault during the month of October, she searches the site for mystery movies. The page that returns the movies categorized as mysteries also displays the Halloween promotion and Vicky learns that all slasher and mystery movies are 15% off until the day after Halloween.
She starts her holiday shopping early by purchasing a copy of Hook, Line, and Sinker and two copies of Stingin' in the Rain.
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