Integrate Piwik with CRM platform

[mattab]

The goal of this issue is to brainstorm what would be a useful integration of Piwik with CRM platforms.

What is a CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It often involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.

Providing value integrating a CRM with Piwik

CRM holds all customer and sales information. Piwik holds all web and mobile user information, and via e-ecommerce Piwik can be used to hold all sales information.

By merging the two database in various ways, we can provide very high value to users.

Feel free to post a comment with your ideas about CRM and Piwik: what would be useful to you?

[mattab]

To integrate CRM and Piwik we would need to use a shared User ID between both platforms.

Here is an idea of a useful feature:

• Inside the CRM, on a client details page, we could link to the Visitor Profile report (or display it in an iframe) for this client. This would let the Sales team or Support team see the website browsing history for this client, better understand the journey.

[AlexanderDAThomas]

I am interested in identifying individual visitors to a website. Is integrating a CRM with Piwik the only way of identifying individual visitors to a website, using Piwik, without creating a website login?

[claytondaley]

Companies definitely need this data flow, but the devil's in the details.

• Web analytics is one of many kinds of data that companies benefit from consolidating on their CRM. They're also interested in
  • Email opens and clicks (e.g. Yesware),
  • Newsletters opens and clicks (all the vendors),
  • Phone calls (e.g. BaseCRM and incidentally a favorite of mine), etc.
• Even more important for companies is keeping their customer and support databases in sync.
• More important than that, a CRM with the right features and cost.

For all of these reasons, it seems to me that Piwik needs to follow users to their CRM. The upside is that this could attract new users (with budget) to Piwik. Maybe the CRMs would even fund the development. A downside is that you've added several (dozens?) of integrations to the project's scope. How would you decide where to start? Is this really in line with Piwik's open source nature?

Next, there's the nitty gritty of this sort of integration:

• Assume a user visited by site 5 times before signing up and logging in. It's nice to capture the one logged-in visit attached to a userid, but I really want to know that they've visited me 5 times. Are you willing to be promiscuous with the userid (i.e. attribute all activities from the visitorid to the userid). What are the edge cases like shared devices and how do you handle them? Does solving these puzzles enhance or distract from Piwik?
• What about identifying visitors who haven't logged in. There are a variety of tools that identify the organization where the visitor originates (i.e. Pardot). This requires an IP so it's really something Piwik would need handle to compete in the space. Is this in scope?

[corrin]

I'm very interested in this. As far as I can tell it involves matching the contacts in CRM with the visitor ID in Piwik. Essentially this becomes a junction table in CRM. The question then is population and management, but if they're simply made CRM's problem for now then that makes it Piwik's side easy.

[mattab]

@corrin which CRM are you interested to link to?

[corrin]

I'm using StayinFront. It's a standard SQL Server database with a contact table.
I've done a bit of reading since I posted a week ago and had some progress. It looks like I arrange things so that logging in causes the userID to be written through to the contact table in CRM, at which point everything works?

[mattab]

GA just released deep integration with SalesForce which looks really useful (It's only available in their premium version it seems)

https://analytics.googleblog.com/2018/01/integration-salesforce-sales-cloud.html

This opens up new ways to understand how customers engage with brands and how marketing programs perform. For example, marketers can explore the relationship between the traffic source for online leads (e.g. organic search vs. paid search vs. email) and the quality of those leads, as measured by how they progress through the sales pipeline.

It's very valuable to integrate CRM data with the analytics platform and give a unified view of users/customers directly within Matomo.

How it works, is that there is some shared ID between the analytics and the CRM. This shared ID is then used to import all CRM data into the analytics (by ID), using a feature such as Custom data import #6613

This give the analytics platform access to all the valuable CRM data such as "Lead quality", "Lead progress in sales funnel", and much more (like "Industry size" etc).