The second in a series of six articles, created to assist in building an Omni Channel Business and surviving in a digital world!

Next step will be IT Engagement Modeling

Customizing your analytic tool will become more important the more you learn and will set the stage for the correct information to be pulled. There is a lot of customization that analytics providers offer. Review these options with the stakeholders in their respective departments, not just the dotcom team. Decide upon the metric criteria you will use for evaluation and decision making in collaboration with all enterprise stakeholders for all channels. Set the criteria that are important to measure and isolate the metrics important to your business channels. This will enable you to then view and share the relevant information with your teams as well as to set goals for improvement and to ascertain success measurement of actionable items.

Not only will data and reporting requirements be different for each industry or competitor within an industry, but for your internal departments as well. For example, the marketing department will need to know if a campaign is pushing customers to the store or a promotion is being redeemed and by what percentage, while the content manager on a content driven site needs to know how long a reader is spending on a page (longer might very well be better in this instance), which will tell the content manager how engaged the person is in what they are reading and where they clicked off to after moving on. Even placement in certain areas on the page becomes important for your vendors with ads. Conversely, on the checkout pages, the customer should be breezing through these quickly, so the metric for time on those pages will naturally have as its goal a much shorter time spent on page. For content sites, you might want to know which placement offers the customer more of a likelihood to click through on the page or which types of links and articles are important. For a commerce site, you might want to know if a customer is having trouble on one of your checkout pages or difficulty logging in. There are at least fifty criteria and many more that you will discern as you learn. From interacting with the raw data, you will see that the criteria and benchmarks will be very different depending upon the end user.

 Benchmarking from industry standards is a critical path to any sustainable action plan. Take the time to understand industry standards. Business verticals can have vastly different metric goals than other verticals. For example, conversion on a commerce site can range from .5% to 23% and higher, depending upon the industry, as many factors influence conversion (promotions, functionality, navigability, etc.). Your business is unique. Taking this into account will then facilitate evaluating the industry standard and then your own deviations from that industry and how that will affect your final actionable benchmark - your own uniqueness. This is key to successful benchmarking. (Many of the analytic companies offer interactive tools embedded in their reporting dashboard systems. You can actually play with quantity of orders combined with conversion rates and order size and other variables to learn the "what if" and teach others).

Personalizing a benchmarking system and so many metrics is complex, but necessary. Doing this with internal resources dedicated to analytics is the best in class way to achieve quick and sustainable results. But outsourcing reports is better than having none of this information. All industries have different benchmarks which indicate success. As mentioned previously, conversion rates are all quite diverse, depending upon the type of channel, content or commerce as well as differences in likeliness to purchase that will change based upon promotion and other criteria. Additionally, if the customer has challenges with the functionality on your website, you will see this by drop off on certain pages. Take this information and compare it with what the customers are saying with the feedback tool for that page on the site. Now you have a full analysis of what is going on. It could be functionality, pricing, in stock conditions or something as simple as broken links. If you don't know what your conversion rate should be, you can't set goals for improvement. To further complicate matters, there are different percentages for different pieces of the conversion funnel. Converting a new visitor to the site is different than converting a returning customer to the site. You will need to isolate these variables separately. Unique visitors to actual visits on the site are two very different pieces of information.

Customer service is handled differently around the Country. And because oftentimes, customer service is a separate entity or a conglomeration of service for various areas in the company, it is vital to obtain and use these customer service statistics as part of your overall analysis and roadmapping.

So, final serious recommendations for your Needs Assessment step:

• Understand the metrics available to track each piece of the business and website
• Learn about industry standards
• Understand your own metrics for success
• Benchmark for goal setting
• Pull out the criteria that you want to use (these will change and evolve over time with new implementations and enhancements)
• Customize reports by collaborating with intertwined departments (For content sites, you might want to know which placement offers the customer more of a likelihood to click through on the page or which types of links and articles are important. For a commerce site, you might want to know if a customer is having trouble on one of your checkout pages or difficulty logging in)
• Find your painpoints and where you excel. This can include core or supporting functionality (i.e., registration, log in, loyalty card integration, store locator, circular, broken links and navigability) or strategies (pricing challenges, assortment, content dynamism and robustness). I worked with a company who implemented an advertising solution that had brought 20M into a competitor yet failed in another. The reason had nothing to do with the solution, merely that the customer had difficulty logging in to their account. This should be no surprise, you should know monthly your core metrics of site performance and monitor and attack any challenges that crop up.
• Share the information with internal and external stakeholders.
• Prioritize work efforts, balancing existing challenges with the implementation of new enhancements but base these on the ROI and what the analytics tell you. You will most probably need to do phased deployments, because you are most likely sharing IT resources with the greater enterprise. Use the science to create ROI documents with actionable plans.
• Blend customer service feedback and metrics from interactions with the call center and with the site analytics for a comprehensive and collaborative view.
• Create a sustainable roadmap based upon ROI. Make sure that your roadmap clearly provides customer centric solutions and is consistent with the goals of the organization. 

A few quick tips:

• Following every release, analytics should be reviewed to ensure that the enhancements of fixes are causing no side effects. This should be part of the testing subsequent to launch. Remember that you need to have your baselines in order to notice spikes
• Let the science direct your decisions and planning
• It is predicted than in less than 12 months greater Internet usage will come from/ through mobile viewership. Accordingly, do what you need to protect your digital core
• Celebrate your successes by consistent communication with internal stakeholders and vendors with vested interests- before long, analytics dashboarding will be just a part of every day
• Understand Social Media, which is becoming a very integral part of the online experience. Using social media, such as facebook, allows customers with the same needs and interests to join and collaborate through online forums, called "social networks." These are very helpful as they can provide information you can collect and use to optimize the experience for your customer. Search engine optimization allows you to index this information and become higher in rankings by using keywords to increase the likelihood of your website or product or information coming up in a search. Using the information you glean from analysis to optimize your search will be important to attract new visitors to your website.

Now that we have the actual science, our jobs have been made much easier. Understanding the customer across channels can be delivered through metric analysis and should guide and govern your decisions going forward. Prior to the inception of these analytic tools and feedback tools, there was a good deal of guesswork involved in making decisions as to which enhancements or new initiatives to deploy. There was very little evidence and proof of concept that could be shown quantifiably. But conversion is conversion and we can see this with absolute certainty across channels.

Looking at this scientific information and making decisions for action based upon these metrics is your key to unlocking future positive ROI initiatives and should guide and govern your decision making for your channels. The same philosophy and set of tools can be used for content and commerce sites and needs to be shared with the greater enterprise so that consistency of efforts will be agreed upon and lessen the push pull and possibly conflicting prioritization within the IT Department, our next step of focus on the path towards successful cross channel development.