Getting to Know Your Website Visitors

Angle

Getting to Know Your Website Visitors

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  December 29, 2015

Most customer journeys these days begin on companies’ websites. So it’s more important than ever that businesses make the most of the time visitors are there.

Businesses can do that in a number of ways. Starting with good website design is always key, of course.

But businesses can also follow online visitors to see where they tend to abandon carts and take steps to improve that friction by tweaking their websites and/or presenting pop-ups offering assistance at that particular point and time. Businesses are also increasingly working to get visitors to register on their websites. That way, businesses can use their own data and pair it with data on social media sites to better understand customers and their prospects.

Altocloud is one company that helps businesses improve their websites to enable self-service, reduce abandoned shopping carts, and remove friction for visitors. The software-as-a-service-based solution provides organizations with a portal through which they have a real-time view into who’s on their website at any time, where that visitor is physically located, and where the person is spending their time on the website, among other parameters. Altocloud’s prescriptive rules-based service also uses machine-based learning to create profiles and do segmentation of people with certain key attributes that make them especially valuable customers or prospects.

The solution also enables organizations to present website visitors with the option to engage with them via an array of communications channels, such as voice, video, or text, or to receive a callback. It also invites visitors to log in to the website, and if they do the organization is presented with those users’ profiles from popular social media sites, what the visitors did in past on the organization’s website, and other data.

“This is really about communications and engagement,” Altocloud CEO Barry O’Sullivan told me in a conversation at the November TMC (News - Alert) Editor’s Day Silicon Valley.

Altocloud serves ecommerce business initiatives and inside sales organizations at such companies as AppDynamics, Cisco (News - Alert), Shimmer, and Smyths Toys. U.K.-based toy retailer Smyths Toys uses Altocloud to monitor carts in an effort to predict who will abandon them. Altocloud’s solution comes into play here by suggesting how, where, and when Smyths Toys can do intervention (such as generating a chat to ask if they can help) to prevent abandoned shopping carts. It can also help businesses understand where there is friction on their websites that is preventing conversions so those businesses can tweak their websites to make them easier to use.

Meanwhile, Gigya (News - Alert) helps businesses connect, collect (information about), and convert website visitors. CEO Patrick Salyer said industry giants such as Fox, KLM, Red Bull, and Turner rely on Gigya’s solution to register their website visitors, collect data from their own sites and from outside sources such as social media on these visitors so they can build rich customer profiles, and help these businesses draw insights on that data in an effort to convert website visits into sales.

Identity is becoming critical to every single business because it’s the starting point for the customer journey, said Salyer. That means businesses need to think about that strategically, as they would with any key infrastructure.




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. [Free eNews Subscription]
blog comments powered by Disqus