Visitor and Conversation Keys

Introduction to Streams

When a Visitor interacts with a Brand, be it through the Web Channel, App, Call Centre etc the Visitor is transitioning from one “Location” to the next, where we consider a Location to be a specific interaction, such as a Personalised Homepage or a Call Centre call. These interactions can be captured and represented as a “stream” of activity, where that stream is the activity for that single visitor in a chronological order. Within Journey Visualisation, there are two different representations of these Visitor activity streams which is based on the “key” that is used to create the streams and these keys are defined as Conversation and Visitor.

Visitor and Conversation Keys

Imagine a single Visitor interacting with a brand through the Web Channel, and during a 1 week period, with that Visitor coming to the website on 3 separate occasions. Having assigned that Visitor a unique CXID (Customer Experience ID) the activity can be visualised. The Journey Visualisation can display this in two ways.

Conversation Key - This would produce 3 separate streams of activity, one for each on the Conversations that the Visitor had with the brand.

Visitor Key - This would display a single stream for that single Visitor to allow analysis of their interactions over time, regardless of how many Conversations this involved.

The two view options are able to answer different questions

If we are key’d on Visitor, and imagine we are interested in Visitors who “Drop Off” after adding an item to a Basket in the Sankey, i.e. Don’t purchase. If I have Key’d the Sankey by Visitor, that Visitors Flow is the “object” I am visualising. In this case, the Add to Basket would not have a “Drop Off” after it if it is not the end of the Stream, the next thing after the Add to Basket might be a Homepage, because in terms of their interaction over time, that was the next time they interacted. Sankey Diagrams, as used in the Journey Visualisation, don’t have a concept of time, so in the Sankey would see:

Homepage ---> Product View ---> Add to Basket ---> Homepage ---> Product Search ---> Homepage ---> Product Search ---> Product View ---> Add to Basket ---> Product Purchase

Note, there is no drop of after the first Add to basket, and no indication that these are not in the same day or Conversation so this users dropped basket would not appear clearly in the view.

If I switch the Journey Visualisation to be key’d on Conversation, this single Customer would result in 3 “flow objects” for the Journey Visualisation to visualise, as there are 3 Conversations, and the data of their Conversation would now show drop off after the Add to basket

If I am looking at a Visitors interactions across Channels and I am not concerned about how many Conversations occurred, I would use the Visitor Key in that instance.