No more anonymous lead scores for our online chat project

[Anonymous]

We are in the middle of a project where we are scoring known and anonymous individuals who interact with our website.  Based on the individual’s behavior we are scoring and sending a trigger once the person crosses the lead score threshold.  Then the rep will follow-up by starting an online chat with the prospect.   

This recent change where Marketo no longer scores anonymous leads until they become known has a significant impact on our project.  We can now only chat with known Marketo individuals.  This severely limits our universe of people to engage with in this manner. 

Are there plans for a workaround? Does this now mean we need to look into costly development time or a third party tool to regain functionality that was available prior to February 5^th? 

[Josh_Hill13]

Claude,

Please see the discussions related to the change.

The docs clearly state that the same behaviors are recorded, however, the direct access to Is Anonymous is now removed. So when someone does become Known, all of their behavior scoring will be executed at that time, if they qualified for a score flow.

I don't really know how you were "chatting" with Anonymous Leads anyway, unless it was through RTP, in which case there is no change.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Claude,

See here for comprehensive discussion on the impacts. Removal of "Is Anonymous" filters.

Can you explain a bit more how you were chatting with non anonymous leads ? As Marketo does not provide any online chat tool, I suppose you are using a third party tool  ?

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Our company primarily markets/sells to existing customers.  In addition to Marketo, we use targeting platforms like DemandBase for paid advertising against named accounts.  The level of insight to those that respond is actually quite impressive.  Not only can they tell us which companies responded, but also which pages they visited (we used to augment this with Marketo to send out real-time alerts to our Sales teams) - along with the demographic/firmographic data associated with each account - but also geo, functional, job/role-specific data, which in turn would often enable us to identify who was actually behind those anonymous responses (and in some cases, the vendors can provide this info for us using their technology).

So just because the response is anonymous, a lot companies consider anonymous activity extremely valuable, especially those that are ABM/account-centric, like ours.

[Josh_Hill13]

Sure, but that's my point - what's Claude trying to do here?

[Justin_Norris1]

Claude Brogunier_P&W​

If I correctly understand your use case, you were intending to score anonymous leads then somehow trigger a third party chat solution to prompt a rep to interact with that anonymous lead based on Marketo lead score?

If this is correct then yes, that functionality would no longer be possible, it seems, with the new changes.

However, I would suggest you look at some off-the-shelf options that may address the underlying purpose of your project (i.e., to proactively target leads with chat who appear to be most engaged) and perhaps in a better way.

There are several chat solutions that can do this and some use machine learning to predict the leads most likely to respond:

Live Person: Predictive Intelligence | Live Chat Online | LivePerson

AltoCloud: Altocloud - Connect with your Digital Customers

[SanfordWhiteman]

I'm a frighteningly longtime user of WhosOn: Live Chat Software for Websites | WhosOn

I'd suggest that waiting on a trigger campaign to score up a lead (and send an alert?) wasn't the best way to do this, anyway.  That process could take 30 seconds+ under load.  The idea of these chat solutions is that are focused on reacting immediately, opening the chat window for you, etc. What you should concentrate on is how to get the lead's email address (which hopefully you can cajole them into giving to you during the chat, if not before) to be associated with their web activity, so the known lead gets the whole history.