Agent capacity optimization and Unica Optimize sessions

You use agent capacity optimization to route high value offers through agents to high value consumers. By routing certain offers for select consumers through your agents, you assure one on one contact with high value consumers and increase the return on your marketing investment.

An agent is associated with many customers, but these customers are not shared with other agents. A customer can be associated with only one agent. You provide this association by using the agent customer relationship table.

Capacity is the number of contacts an agent can handle for the optimization period or run. To use agent capacity optimization, you must create an agent customer relationship table and an agent information table in the Unica Campaign system table database so that this information is used during optimization for agent capacity optimization. These tables are referred to as agent tables.

To use agent capacity optimization, while you create a Unica Optimize session, you must declare a campaign channel that is considered as an agent channel. All offers that are proposed through this channel are routed through agents. You specify one agent information table and one agent customer relationship table for your session. Then, you define one or more Min/Max # offers capacity rules on the agent channel.

The agent customer relationship table contains the unique identification values (IDs) of agents and the audience ID of associated customers. This table must be present in the Unica Campaign system database. The audience level of the audience ID must be the same as the audience level of your Unica Optimize session. The ordinal position of the fields of the agent customer relationship table is fixed, and must have the following information.
  • The first column must be the agent ID, having the data type as either an integer, varchar, or text.
  • The second column must be an audience ID, having the data type the same as the data type of the audience level. If the audience level consists of two or more fields, then this table should have the same number of fields as the audience ID. The sequence of these audience fields should be the same it is defined in Unica Campaign.
The agent information table contains the unique identification values (IDs) of agents and their capacity. This table must be present in the Unica Campaign system database. The ordinal position of the fields of the agent information table is also fixed, and must have the following information.
  • The first column must be agent ID, having the data type as either an integer, varchar, or text.
  • The second column must be the capacity of the agent, having the data type as an integer.

The Min/Max # offers capacity rule on the agent channel that you define identifies the customers who are targeted to receive offers through the agent channel. The agent information table and agent customer relationship tables are referenced to filter the list, and any other rules and constraints that you supply are also applied. The result is an agent-specific list of high-value customers for the offer.

Scenario example

The following scenario is an example of when to use agent capacity optimization.

You want to promote a fund-raiser by offering an incentive to customers who participate. Your company wants to offer these discounts for customers in a specific region through an employee/customer relationship. There are three locations in this area. There is an employee (or "agent") that is allocated for each area. Because this company has a limited number of employees and the costs of direct contact are typically high in comparison with other channels, such as email or online, they want to route these offers through employees only for high profile customers (for example, customers that have an income greater than $25,000 per month). For other customers, the email channel would be selected.

Enabling agent capacity optimization

Before you produce any output, you must set up the database properly to support the use of agent capacity optimization.

The relationship between the agent and customer, as well as every agent's capacity to contact customers over the optimization time period, is supplied by the information you enter in the database tables. The capacity of each agent cannot be specified from within the user interface. This must be provided to Unica Optimize by using the agent information table.

  1. Create the agent tables in the Unica Campaign system tables database. For more information about Unica Optimize system tables, see the Unica Optimize System Tables. You must populate these tables, either by using your customer scripts or by using third-party ETL tools, before you run the Unica Optimize session.
  2. Enter the names of the agent tables in Affinium | Campaign | partition | partition[n] | Optimize | AgentTemplateTables. When you create a Unica Optimize session, you select from the agent tables. These tables must be populated before you run the Unica Optimize session for processing of agent capacity optimization. To enter multiple tables, use a comma-separated list.
  3. Add a channel in Unica Campaign that is used as the agent channel for agent capacity optimization.
  4. Create offers that will be routed through the Agent channel. For more information about offers, see the Unica Campaign Administrator's Guide.
  5. Design a campaign and add a flowchart.