When you administer Interact you configure and maintain users and roles, data sources, and optional product features. You also monitor and maintain the design and runtime environments. Product-specific application programming interfaces (APIs) are available for you to use.
This section describes the administrative utilities available with Interact.
Interact requires you to configure two sets of users, runtime environment users and design environment users.
Interact requires several data sources to function properly. Some data sources contain the information Interact requires to function, other data sources contain your data.
You can configure Interact in many ways to enhance how it selects offers to present. The following sections describe these optional features in detail.
Interact serves offers dynamically to a wide variety of touchpoints. For example, you can configure the runtime environment and your touchpoint to send messages to your call center employees informing them of the best up sell or cross sell prospects for a customer who has called with a specific type of service inquiry. You can also configure the runtime environment and your touchpoint to provide tailored offers to a customer (visitor) who has entered a particular area of your Web site.
Whenever you use the startSession method, you create a Interact runtime session on the runtime server. You can use configuration properties to manage the sessions on a runtime server.
The following sections list requirements and other details you should know before you work with the Interact API.
The following sections list requirements and other details you should know before you work with the Interact JavaScript API.
Interact offers an extensible macro, EXTERNALCALLOUT, for use with your interactive flowcharts. This macro enables you to perform custom logic to communicate with external systems during flowchart runs. For example, if you want to calculate the credit score of a customer during a flowchart run, you can create a Java™ class (a callout) to do so and then use the EXTERNALCALLOUT macro in a Select process in your interactive flowchart to get the credit score from your callout.
The runDeployment command-line tool lets you deploy an interactive channel for a specific server group from the command line, using the settings provided by a deployment.properties file that outlines all the possible parameters and is available in the same location as the runDeployment tool itself. The ability to run an interactive channel deployment from the command line is specifically useful when you are using the OffersBySQL feature. For example, you might configure a Campaign batch flowchart to run on a periodic basis. When the flowchart run completes, a trigger can be called to initialize deployment of the offers in the OffersBySQL table using this command line tool.
runDeployment
OffersBySQL
Interact offers a learning module which uses a naive-bayesian algorithm to monitor visitor actions and propose optimal offers (in terms of acceptance). You can implement the same Java™ interface with your own algorithms using the Learning API to create your own learning module.
The Interact installation includes two WDSL (Web Services Description Language) XML files that describe the available web services and how to access them. You can view these files in your Interact home directory, and an example is shown here.
This section describes all the configuration properties for the Interact runtime environment.
This section describes all the configuration properties for Interact design environment.
There may be situations where you want to provide real-time offer personalization without implementing low-level Java™ code or SOAP calls to the Interact server. For example, when a visitor initially loads a web page where Javascript content is your only extended programming available, or when a visitor opens an email message where only HTML content is possible. HCL® Interact provides several connectors that provide real-time offer management in situations where you have control only over the web content that is loaded on the client side, or where you want to simplify your interface to Interact.
HCL® Interact can integrate with IBM Digital Recommendations to provide Interact-driven product recommendations. Both products can provide product recommendations for offers, but using different methods. Digital Recommendations uses a visitor's web behavior (collaborative filter) to build correlations between visitors and recommended offers. Interact is based on customer's past behavior, attributes, history, and less on view-level offers, learning which offers best match a customer's behavior profile (based on demographics and other information about the customer). Offer acceptance rates help to build a predictive model through self-learning. Using the best of both products, Interact can use a personal profile to define offers that will pass a category ID to Digital Recommendations and retrieve recommended products based on popularity (the "wisdom of the crowds") for display to the visitor as part of the selected offers. This can provide better recommendations for customers that will result in more click-throughs and better outcomes than either product acting alone.
With Digital Data Exchange, your website can link to Interact to provide a powerful omni-channel execution engine that delivers the best offers to the optimum channels and evolves (learns) from the offer feedback to continuously increase marketing effectiveness.
Use triggered message gateways to send and receive offer information from inbound and outbound channels.
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