Context
The discovery phase is an important step when implementing Sitecore CDP and Personalize into a business because it is the foundation for a successful deployment. This will become the building blocks to align to your business goals and KPIs, understand stakeholder requirements, and ensures seamless integration with the businesses existing systems.
Discovery is a process that is revisted over time as new priorities emerge and new opportunities to personalize your cutomer journey are identified.
Execution
By mapping customer journeys, defining personalization strategies and reviewing the technical infrastructure, the discovery phase allows for a more tailored approach that considers the businesses goals, how they manage their data/infrastructure, current personalization plans and scalability. The discovery phase reduces risks, optimises the businesses resources, and establishes clear metrics for success, ensuring that Sitecore CDP and Personalize effectively drives the business outcomes. This can all be planned in a step by step approach where you can:
- build and plan the use case idea backlog,
- choose the priority they should be deployed in,
- build, test and deploy the use case,
- review and measure the effectiveness of the use case
- finally agree on what can be used as learnings for your users/customers within the marketing playbook or what is a success story and can be deployed to all customers.
Understand Business Goals and KPI
Setting goals and KPIs before starting a project using Sitecore CDP and Personalize is crucial to clarify the business objectives within the businesses specific industry. Personalization projects can involve a variety of strategies and tactics, from dynamic content delivery to personalized next best actions for specific audiences. Having clear goals helps the business define what success looks like. For example, is the business aiming to increase conversion rates, drive ancillary upsells, or boost customer retention.
Without clear objectives, a business will struggle to prioritize features or align the project with the broader business key objectives in mind.
Aligning stakeholders to the overall project delivery is a key metric to success. Setting measurable goals and KPIs helps ensure that all stakeholders (e.g., marketing, product, IT, and leadership) are on the same page. It aligns everyone around shared objectives, which is critical for maintaining focus and momentum throughout the project.
Targeted Stakeholders
The discovery phase for implementing CDP and Personalize is critical to ensuring alignment across the organization, defining clear objectives, and setting expectations for the project. Several teams should be involved to ensure the successful integration and utilization of both tools.
| Stakeholder | Role | Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| Business Teams - Marketing, Sales, Product etc | Business team insights help guide the overall goals and objectives for customer experience, segmentation, and personalization strategies. Their involvement ensures the solutions are aligned with the wider business goals. | - Define objectives for personalization and segmentation. - Build backlog of Use Cases - Outline customer experience expectations. - Set key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics for success |
| IT / Technical Teams | CDP and Personalize require integration with other systems (e.g., CRM, marketing automation, CMS). IT teams are crucial to assess technical & data requirements, infrastructure readiness, data privacy concerns, and system integrations. | - Assess technical compatibility and infrastructure needs. - Identify integration points with other platforms (e.g., CRM, Analytics). - Ensure data security and compliance (e.g., GDPR). - Plan data flow and system architecture. |
| Data Analysts / Data Science Teams | These teams are important part of understanding the data, defining the customer segments, and analyzing the customer behavior that will be used for personalization and segmentation. Their input ensures the right data is collected and that the solution can deliver actionable insights. | - Define data collection requirements and ensure that the right data points are tracked. - Help in designing and validating personalization strategies. |
| Customer Experience (CX) / UX Teams | They are key to ensuring that personalization efforts align with the intended customer experience and the brand guidelines. | - Design and test personalized content and interactions. - Collaborate with marketing to ensure consistency in messaging and touchpoints. |
| Project Management / Implementation Teams | These teams are responsible for overseeing the project, ensuring milestones are met, resources are allocated appropriately, and the overall timeline is adhered to. | - Manage timelines, deliverables, and project resources. - Coordinate communication across teams. - Keep the project aligned with objectives and scope. |
Operating Model Planning
Operating models play a crucial role in the context of CDP and Personalize by providing a structured framework to leverage the customer data and plan use case tests based on the overall business objectives. Often the business might be good at ideation and making use case backlogs, but when it comes down to implementation then there might be some internal issues to implement the overall personalization process. The important points to consider in an operating model are:
- Team structure: do they have the requisite knowledge to be effective
- Process: does the current process support your team or get in the way. Where are the bottlenecks and how can they be removed?
- Documentation: is there a way the business is documenting objectives, implementation, use case backlogs and results.
- Tools: Does the teams have the right tools to complete their tasks.
Understanding the setup/landscape
Understanding a business setup and stack landscape is crucial when planning the implementation of CDP and Personalize because it ensures that these products are integrated effectively into the organization’s existing systems and workflows. A clear understanding of the current infrastructure, technology stack, customer touchpoints, and data architecture enables:
- Seamle-ss Integration: Ensures Sitecore tools can connect and work smoothly with existing platforms (e.g., CRM, eCommerce, marketing automation systems), avoiding technical roadblocks.
- Tailored Personalization: Helps align personalization strategies with existing customer journeys and touchpoints, ensuring that the right content reaches the right audience at the right time.
- Data Utilization: Allows for better segmentation and customer insights by understanding current data flows, governance, and analytics practices, which improves targeting and messaging.
- Scalability and Customization: Identifies future needs and allows for custom development, making it possible to adapt Sitecore’s solutions as the business grows or evolves.
- Compliance and Security: Ensures that the implementation meets necessary legal and privacy requirements, especially when handling customer data.
- Improved Performance: Alignes with the business measurement of success by aligning with the business’s KPIs and ensuring that performance metrics can be tracked and optimized.
Understanding the business setup ensures that the implementation is aligned with strategic goals, integrates seamlessly with existing systems, and maximizes the impact of CDP and Personalize for personalized, data-driven customer experiences.
Expectations and timelines
Creating a dynamic personalised journey for your customers must be viewed like a ladder. To get to a point of providing best-in-class customer experiences – we must start at the first step and climb up.
Building expectations within the different teams and highlighting timelines is essential when implementing CDP and Personalize especially when using the Crawl, Walk, Run approach. This phased strategy ensures a gradual, manageable rollout that allows for testing, learning, and scaling over time.
- Clear Milestones: The Crawl, Walk, Run approach sets achievable stages, helping teams focus on specific goals and avoid overwhelming them with too many things at once. This creates realistic expectations and allows stakeholders to understand what will be delivered and when.
- Risk Management: By starting small (Crawl), businesses can identify potential challenges early in the process, refine strategies, and resolve issues before scaling to broader implementations (Walk and Run). This reduces the risk of large-scale disruptions.
- Continuous Improvement: The phased rollout encourages ongoing optimization. Starting with the basics lets teams test and learn, making it easier to fine-tune personalization efforts and data management before moving to more advanced features.
- Resource Allocation: Establishing clear timelines and expectations ensures that resources—whether time, budget, or people, are allocated effectively throughout the project. Teams can be prepared for each phase and adjust based on progress.
- Stakeholder Alignment: The approach helps align business stakeholders with the implementation timeline, ensuring they understand when and how CDP and Personalize will impact business operations. This alignment fosters better communication, smoother collaboration, and more effective change management.
The Crawl, Walk, Run approach to CDP and Personalize implementation helps build a structured, scalable roadmap that manages risks, ensures smooth transitions, and delivers continuous value. It allows businesses to start small, learn, and evolve into advanced capabilities, all while managing expectations and staying aligned with short and long term goals.
Decision Models
Decision models are key to leveraging CDP and Personalize by helping business make data-driven, personalized decisions at scale and in real time. These decision models use customer data and behavior insights to guide and automate the delivery of relevant, targeted experiences across various touchpoints.
Decision models are built using behavioral, historical, and transactional data, along with AI and programmable logic, to determine the next-best action for customers in real-time to guide and automate the delivery of relevant, targeted experiences across various touchpoints. Additionally, CDP and Personalize allows for A/B testing of decision models to evaluate their effectiveness without disrupting current offerings.
Decision models in CDP and Personalization enable organizations to use customer data to make intelligent, timely, and automated decisions that enhance personalization, improve engagement, and ultimately drive better business outcomes. They empower businesses to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, creating a more relevant and impactful customer experience.
Measures Effectiveness
Setting clear goals and measuring them when personalizing your customer channels such as website and app is essential to ensure that your efforts are effective and aligned with business objectives. Goals provide a clear direction and focus, helping you prioritize which aspects of the user experience to tailor and ensuring that personalization aligns with broader business targets, like increasing conversions, building engagement, or customer retention.
By measuring these goals, you can track the success of your initiatives, identify what’s working, and make data-driven decisions to optimize further. Without this feedback loop, personalization efforts can be unknown with no clear values assigned, leading to missed opportunities or ineffective strategies. In short, setting and measuring goals enables continuous improvement, allowing you to refine and enhance user experiences based on real results, ultimately driving higher satisfaction and business success.