HCL® Interact operates as part of the HCL® Marketing Software suite of products.

HCL® Interact 11.0 includes the following new features.

The following table lists issues in Interact 11.0.

The following table lists known limitations in Interact 11.0.

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.

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.

This section describes the administrative utilities available with Interact.

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 the Interact simulator.

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.

An installation of Interact is complete when you install, configure, and deployinstall and configure Interact. The Interact Installation Guide provides detailed information about installing, configuring, and deployinginstalling and configuring Interact.

When you plan your Interact and Attribution Modeler installation, you must ensure that you have set up your system correctly, and that you have configured your environment to deal with any failures.

The Interact runtime environment uses data sources to store user and interaction data.

You must run the HCL® Marketing Software installer to start the installation of Interact. The HCL Marketing Software installer starts the Interact installer during the installation process. Make sure that the HCL Marketing Software installer and the product installer are saved at the same location.

You must complete specific tasks before you deploy Interact. There are no pre-deployment configuration tasks for Interact Design Time and Interact Run Time.

You must deploy the Interact runtime environment for every instance of the runtime server that you install. The Interact design time environment is deployed automatically with the Campaign EAR or WAR file.

After you deploy Marketing PlatformCampaignDistributed MarketingeMessageContact OptimizationInteractLeadsOpportunity DetectDigital Analytics for On PremisesCustomerInsightPredictiveInsightMarketing OperationsInteraction HistoryAttribution ModelerIBM® SPSS® Modeler Advantage Enterprise Marketing Management Edition, you must configure the Interact design time and runtime environments. Configuring the environments completes a basic installation of Interact.

In the Campaign family of products, partitions provide a way to secure the data that is associated with different groups of users. When you configure Campaign or a related HCL® Marketing Software application to operate with multiple partitions, users can see each partition as a separate instance of the application. There is no indication that other partitions exist on the same computer.

Run the Interact and Attribution Modeler uninstallers to uninstall Interact. When you run the Interact uninstaller, the files that were created during the installation process are removed. For example, files such as configuration files, installer registry information, and user data are removed from the computer.

The properties and values on the Configuration page are stored in the Marketing Platform system tables. You can use the configTool utility to import and export configuration settings to and from the system tables.

An installation of Interact consists of several components including third-party tools (such as web application servers, databases, and load balancers) and HCL® components such as Marketing Platform and Campaign. All of these components have several properties, features, and settings you can configure to improve performance.

An upgrade of Interact is complete when you upgrade, configure, and deployupgrade and configure Interact. The Interact Upgrade Guide provides detailed information about upgrading, configuring, and deployingupgrading and configuring Interact.

Upgrade your installation of Interact after understanding the guidelines that are specific to your current version of Interact.

You can upgrade Interact by overwriting your existing Interact installation. If you cannot upgrade your current version of Interact directly, you must install Interact in a new location.

You must deploy the Interact runtime environment for every instance of the runtime server that you install. The Interact design time environment is deployed automatically with the Campaign EAR or WAR file.

Run the Interact and Attribution Modeler uninstallers to uninstall Interact. When you run the Interact uninstaller, the files that were created during the installation process are removed. For example, files such as configuration files, installer registry information, and user data are removed from the computer.

The properties and values on the Configuration page are stored in the Marketing Platform system tables. You can use the configTool utility to import and export configuration settings to and from the system tables.

The IBM Marketing Software Fast upgrade process is introduced to help complete the upgrade process in a short time so that you encounter less downtime on your production environment. Also, Fast upgrade process will get executed on clean 11.0 environment, so users existing environment will remain untouched.

HCL® Interact is an interactive engine that targets personalized offers to visitors of inbound marketing channels. You can configure Interact to be behavioral, strictly event-based, situational, strategic, and so on. Interact is a module within the HCL® Marketing Software suite of tools.

Designing the Interact configuration is a multi-step process that involves many people in your organization. You work with theInteract user interface, the Interact API, and Campaign flowcharts to configure your interactive marketing campaign.

Interactive flowcharts are similar to Campaign batch flowcharts when used to create strategic segments.

When Interact is installed, the Interact List process is available in batch flowcharts. Similar to the Call List and Offer List processes, the Interact List process allows you to specify which offers are served to which visitors to your interactive site. This provides you with the ability to target offers to entire audience levels, target specific individual audience members, or suppress offers from specific audience members by using table-driven features.

Deployment is how you transfer all the configuration that you define in the design environment to the runtime server groups. Deployment is grouped by interactive channel. When you deploy an interactive channel, you are sending all the data that is associated with an interactive channel to the selected runtime server group. This is why, when you are creating interactive channels, you must define the production runtime servers and the non-production (testing) runtime servers.

Interact is integrated with HCL® Marketing Software reporting to deliver comprehensive Cognos® reports in Interact.

When you install the HCL® Interact design time server, you also run a series of SQL scripts to set up the required system tables in your data source that Interact needs to operate. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the design time system tables.

When you install the HCL® Interact runtime server, you also run a series of SQL scripts to set up the required system tables in your data source that Interact needs to operate. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the runtime system tables.

When you install the HCL® Interact design time server, you also run a SQL script to set up the required tables in your data source that Interact needs to run the learning service. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the learning tables.

When you install the HCL® Interact runtime server, you also run a SQL script to set up the required user tables in your data source that Interact needs to operate. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the user tables.

When you install the HCL® Interact design time server, you also run a SQL scripts to set up the required tables in your data source that Interact needs to track contact and response history data. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the contact and response history tables.

This section describes the database schema design for the HCL® Interact Event Pattern report. To improve the Event Pattern report execution time, the report is designed to run on the aggregated data. The aggregation process is to collect the transactional ETL data and store it in separate tables from which the report is generated. The tables in which the aggregated data is stored are described here.

When you install the HCL® Interact Event Pattern ETL process, you also run a SQL script to set up the required event pattern tables in your data source that Interact needs to operate. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the event pattern tables.

This chapter provides usage information about HCL® Campaign macros. Be sure to read this chapter before you attempt to use macros in HCL Campaign.

This chapter provides usage information about HCL® Interact macros. Be sure to read this chapter before you attempt to use macros in HCL Interact.

This section describes each available macro that is available for use in HCL Campaign, HCL Interact, or both. Macros are listed in alphabetical order.

The integration between HCL® Interact and HCL Interact Advanced Patterns provides advanced pattern recognition capabilities for your Interact implementation.

HCL Marketing Software provides GDPR support for the following Marketing Software products:

The high level procedure to execute the Interact GDPR utility is listed underneath: