First impressions of Boxever – the new personalization tool for Sitecore

So for those who don’t know. Boxever has just been acquired by Sitecore and now sits as its main personalization tool. Currently, training is free, and below are some of my first impressions whilst working through the training.

1 – Built for the strategist/ author

So straight away you can tell this tool is built for the person(s) who will be using it day in and day out. Everything is simple to use and find. Terminology is also spot on, with everything self-explanatory. As per the visual below, setting up tests is simple and logical (add the variants, add the target, the audience and the decisioning…)

2 – Decisioning at the core

Always a tricky part to personalization and one we just love to overcomplicate. The Decision model can be as simple or complex as you want. Out the box are a host of rules to use without having to think about other data streams. And even then if you want to include other data, then that’s pretty easy to hook up too.

3 – Freedom with rule queries (and/ or)

This is where the simplicity kicks in again. More often than not personalization is for niche segments. Using the query tool in segments we can very quickly identify who they are; be that via unique events or urls (and everything in between). The format is easy on the eye so quickly you can see the difference between segments

4 – Reuse and scalability

Some there are some helpful items such as library templates, so you can store and reuse tests making time to deploy even faster. Even the homepage “Good afternoon, Dominic”, with its blocks, shows you what you have live and running (experiences, experiments, segments)…

5 – Reporting

Sounds daft but as good as a tool can be, if it can’t show you insight it has failed. Boxever doesn’t let us down and the reports do exactly what they need to. Very quickly you can see if a variant is working and you can filter down to get the extra detail that is often needed (what segments are working!).