Any Channel, Any Time

The best way to understand MXO is to start from the simple fundamental concept that underpins everything that MXO does, namely, it's omni-channel from the ground up. MXO has been developed and built to be Channel agnostic, both when listening to customer activity and when optimising customer conversations. This means that MXO isn't tied to a specific Channel as perhaps a marketing automation system is closely aligned with email or content management systems are focused on the Web.

Instead, MXO helps to provide a customer experience that is bespoke and continuous irrespective of format.

MXO gives your business users – the marketing folks, if you want to be specific – an omni-channel language that lets you shape how it uses Touchpoints to converse with customers – any Touchpoint, on any device. MXO doesn't care about the format, it cares about delivering the same conversation in the best way that you want to make the conversation successful.

Touchpoint Listening

Even though MXO doesn't care about the Channel when having a conversation, MXO cares a lot about understanding the Channel context so it can enable the right conversation – listening and responding in real time – to reside inherently in the Touchpoints your customers want to use.

On the listening side, we've packed MXO with inherent listening capability, providing Touchpoint solutions for each Channel that your customers use as they travel across your brand. These Touchpoint solutions are designed to work seamlessly with the Channel solutions you already have. Let's make a list.

• For anything that happens in a web browser, there's the JavaScript-based MXO Tag that lets you to track and capture web activity on any part of any web page you offer.
• Mobile application listening, that's done through dedicated SDKs for iOS and Android.
• Traditional outbound email, supported by a tracking pixel dropped into an email template.
• Assisted Channel listening, say for agents in a contact center, made possible by standard integrations to Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and SAP.

If there's any other Touchpoint you want listened to – let's say a point-of-sale system or other front of house applications – then we give you programmatic APIs packaged in a number of language-specific SDKs to quickly and easily listen and optimize on those specialised Touchpoints.

Journey Analytics

With each interaction it listens to, MXO gathers the behavior and then visually represents it, providing the basis for insight into the actual journeys your customers are taking, every day, to and from the Touchpoints and Channels to which you're listening. This is incredibly powerful on three levels:

• Actual – That's the key word here. MXO journey visualisation reflects the actual customer journeys, as opposed to perceived customer journeys you may find in a marketing automation systems that have nurture tracks. The analytics portion of MXO shows, for any Proposition, how your customers flow between the lifecycle stages you have defined; where customers join, when they drop out of a given journey, and how they interact with Channels and Touchpoints. Again, what customers are actually doing.
• Visual - Doesn't sound important but it's more than just pretty pictures. Your customer journeys are there for you to see – not only for the marketing folks, but also for the people on the front-line of customer service. MXO provides customer journeys across all Lifecycle Stages and Channels, enabling you to visualise at both the Channel level and individual Touchpoint level. It means that your agents or representatives facing customers can see the customer journey before or as they make contact with your reps. Informed and up-to-date contact center representatives – what customer and business wouldn't want to have that?
• Exportable - Within MXO's scope and with customer service applications, customer journey insight can be accumulated and exported for further analysis to industry tools that lie outside of MXO. If you want to dig even deeper into your data, MXO will help you to import it into other tools like Microsoft Power BI or Tableau that will slice and dice MXO customer behavior even further.

Touchpoint Optimization

A MXO customer conversation works in two directions: listening and optimization. An optimization is an active response to the customer at their Touchpoint that's based on their journey behavior and what we know about them. In other words, it's when MXO turns the listening insight into an action that is directed to the customer.

To optimise a conversation, MXO gives you the capability for actionability, like listening, which is provided by MXO at each Touchpoint. For web and mobile web, the MXO Tag provides an overlay capability that allows you to present content on web pages in a non-intrusive way, replacing or supplementing existing content. Content overlay also happens in our iOS and Android SDKs which are deployed directly within mobile applications.

For outbound communications, like email, MXO can trigger leads based on real-time customer behavior directly in your CRM or Marketing Automation solution. In contact centers and for social media interaction, optimizations occur as "next best conversations" that are delivered to the agent interface – Salesforce, SAP and Microsoft Dynamics and bespoke systems–and targeted social media solutions.

Customer Identification

A basic premise of optimised engagement is understanding your customers as individuals, but it's very hard to begin to do this in the omni-channel world unless you have a way to reliably identify them each and every time they travel to your business. MXO addresses this through an identification framework that not only gives your business the ability to capture customer identifiers at each Touchpoint, but also, links the same customer across different Touchpoints when the identifiers match. This can include capturing identifiers from outbound communications, directly from web and mobile applications, from CRM, Call Center or other customer solutions. When a customer is identified using the MXO framework, MXO considers that customer as a known customer which allows it to keep the conversation relevant and consistent across Touchpoints.

As MXO listens to customer interactions on Touchpoints, it associates the activity to customer identifiers held in our Adaptive Engagement profile. Every time a customer reaches a Touchpoint – device, browser, mobile phone, iPad, TV, etc. – MXO looks to see if that customer exists and associates them to their customer identifier. MXO will continually look to link activity for these identifiers and when it can do so, it will associate all the journey behavior into a single customer profile, unifying and retaining the customer behavior and insight throughout. In this way, MXO enables your business to optimise conversations with customers right from their first, anonymous, interaction, through their identification over each Touchpoint to a state where MXO recognises the customer as they interact over all Channels and Touchpoints.

Data Adapter Framework

MXO constantly gathers customer journey behavior, acting as a light engagement layer to your systems of record. For truly optimised conversions, MXO uses its journey behavior and the data contained in your systems of records through the use of data adapters. MXO's Data Adapter framework provides an easy way to integrate with well-known or bespoke systems of record. Data from these systems is read on-demand into memory to support decision making during a customer conversation at any given Touchpoint.

MXO Data Adapters augment behavioural insights with system of record data for customers. This happens when, for example, MXO is listening to a website and at a capture point, the customer provides a membership identifier. MXO, in real-time and through the Data Adapter, looks to associate the membership identifier to a system of record, say a CRM system. If found, the MXO profile is now augmented with access to the CRM data for the same customer. MXO makes the association between its customer identifier and the CRM record but does not duplicate the storage of CRM data in MXO; it simply references this data for the purposes of optimization.

The Data Adapter Framework is completely configurable in that there are no mandatory required attributes that need to be configured for decision-making within MXO. There's also no requirement for PII data attributes held in systems of records to be persisted. The Data Adapter Framework also supports pushing data to systems of record, meaning that MXO can create customer records – sales leads, service cases, updates to customer contact information – for your systems of records.

MXO's Data Adapters also provide access to customer location, information on the device they're using and other meta-data that can be used to have the best conversation with your customer.

Decision-Making Framework

Conversation optimization in MXO takes place as result of the MXO decision-making engine. The decision making engine takes into consideration the customer context at their Touchpoint, journey context, all existing knowledge about the customer, plus all the real-time behavior as it makes the decision on what conversation to have. How then does it make the decision?

The key to MXO decision-making is arbitration, meaning MXO will choose the best conversation from all available eligible conversations based on the priorities your business configures in MXO. Through its natural language business user interface, marketers build expressions (think of these as rules) to make sure a conversation is appropriate and relevant to the customer. MXO also lets you use expressions to control how actions are ranked during the decision-making process. These expressions provide MXO with the direction from your business as to how you make a decision about the best action to show to a customer at any time. Then MXO decides based on the priority you tell it to use.

Arbitration is configurable in MXO, but is typically based on a combination of customer behavioural insights and customer insights. This for example, means an organisation can prioritize conversations based on real time customer behavior across all Touchpoints as well as looking at previous purchase history or specified preferences. MXO uses clever half-life decay algorithms to ensure the most recent customer intent and behavior is prioritised. v also provides many out of the box arbitration methods that let organisations choose the right balance between customer (outside-in) and business (inside-out) prioritisation. As with most areas of MXO, out-of-the-box arbitration options are great, but you can also create your own custom prioritization expressions if required.