What is connected capabilities?
Connected capabilities refers to the integrated use of Voyado Product Discovery and Voyado Customer Engagement to enable a unified end-customer experience by advanced, cross-channel personalization and understanding of the visitor. This is achieved by sharing and maintaining a synchronized unified identifier across both systems. Where the end-customer is cross-identified, data such as behavioral data, audiences and recommendations can be used across the two products to support Connected Capability features.
How Customer Engagement and Product Discovery identify the same visitor
The customerKey is the unique identifier for a visitor on the website and is required for every request to the Customer Engagement API. In Voyado Engage, the corresponding identifier is the DiscoveryKey. The customerKey and DiscoveryKey represent the same value for the same individual.
For Connected Capabilities purposes, the DiscoveryKey is used to link the same end-customer across Customer Engagement and Customer Engagement. The ContactID is an Engage-specific identifier for the Contact record and may also be processed in connection with the linked end-customer profile where a DiscoveryKey/customerKey is present.
All end-customer keys are stored in a matching table (avoiding the need to query Customer Engagement on each request), and this table is continuously updated as Contacts are added/ removed.
How and when is the visitor cross-identified?
To enable cross-identification between Customer Engagement and Product Discovery, the website visitor must be identified on the website in some way, enabling the same individual to be recognized across both applications. Identification may occur, e.g., when the visitor logs in, registers an account, completes a purchase as a member, clicks a link in a Customer Engagement email or is recognized through reading customerKey from a cookie. Exactly when the connection is established depends on the Customer’s implementation and when the relevant data is sent to the respective systems. Regardless of the method, some form of identification is required for the Contact record in Customer Engagement and the customerKey in Product Discovery to be linked together.
Once identified, the customerKey is linked to the Customer Engagement ContactID, whereupon pseudonymized behavioral data is synchronized and linked to the identified person.
What changes when the visitor is cross-identified?
When Connected Capabilities is used, a significant data processing difference arises compared to using Product Discovery on its own. In Product Discovery alone, the end-customer is not directly identifiable by Voyado, as the website visitor’s behavioral data (views and clicks on products, purchases, add-to-carts, and search phrases) and the session key are stored on a pseudonymized customerKey. Since Voyado does not hold the customerKey, it cannot independently identify the end-customer.
With Connected Capabilities, however, this data is linked to Customer Engagement, where the end-customer is identified; meaning that the pseudonymized profile in Product Discovery becomes de-pseudonymized. Once the end-customer is cross-identified (i.e. connected) across both platforms, with a shared end-customer key enabling the connection between them, behavioral data and session keys are associated with the identified end-customer in Customer Engagement. In addition, historical or in-store purchase data may be transferred from Customer Engagement to Product Discoveryand linked to the shared DiscoveryKey/customerKey (in-store purchase synchronization). As a result, the scope of processing is expanded: data that was originally stored in pseudonymized form in Product Discovery becomes linked to an identified individual in Customer Engagement, enabling Voyado to identify the end-customer.