New features and changes in version 11.0.1

Interact main menu

• Wherever Interact is installed, a top menu “Interact" is now added next to “Campaign" menu on the user interface (UI) . The Interact installer will handle this change for new installs and upgrades too.
• You can now see the “Interactive Channel�? menu as the first menu under the “Interact�? menu at the top. The “Interactive Channels�? list page will work precisely the same as before.
• You can also see a menu item “Global Learning�? under the “Interact�? menu after “Interactive Channels�?. This menu will take you to the “All Bin definitions�? page where all the existing bin definitions related to interact learning will be displayed with the option to add new bins.

Auto binning

In Interact, the built-in learning algorithm works partly by saving and analysing the values of profile attributes at the time offers were contacted and responded. Some attributes may have virtually unlimited number of unique values. However, due to limited resources in an Interact system, you can save only a small number of them. In addition, often it is more reasonable to do the analysis based on the ranges of the values. You can use this feature is to create such bins in Interact and the learning sub-system will automatically do the mapping.

You can create the bin definitions from Interact -> Global Learning -> All Bin Definitions page. While adding, or editing a bin definition you can select profile attributes from list of ALL attributes from all mapped profile tables. The types of a Bin Definition can be either Range or List. The “Range�? type can only have mathematic operators, the “List�? type can only have “contains�? operator and consists of list of values.

Example “Range�? type bin:low income < =3000030000 < medium income < =60000high income > 60000

Example: “List�? type bin:New England: MA, NH, CTNorth West: MI, IL

A bin definition is global data across all interactive channels and across all learning models.

All bin definitions will be deployed as part of Global Deployment Data. You can deploy them in any interactive channel, deploying once and deployed for ALL.

Custom contact type

You can use your own custom contact code to be used in postEvent calls. The purpose of this enhancement is to provide a full support of contact statuses based on the contents in the Campaign system tables with the option forf override.

To achieve this, you should add a new Contact Status Code in UA_ContactStatus and use that whenever a contact event is posted. You can even define the Custom Contact codes under RunTime configuration. The action in UI on the custom contact code overrides the action of that in the System table.

Example:

You have added a custom entry in Campaign System Table UA_ContactStatus for contact status code as “OPEN�? and “1�? in CountasContact column. In the UI, under configuration settings Interact | services | contactHist | contactStatusCodes, if you add the code as “OPEN�? and action as “None�?, when “OPEN�? contact status code is used in postEvent call, it will not be considered as a true Contact. Thus, preference is given to what action you have set on UI than the action you have set in the UA_ContactStatus table.

GDPR

As part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Interact provides a utility which allows Interact users to generate ‘delete’ statements for the customer’s record that need to be erased from the Interact system. These delete statements are specific to the system tables only. The utility takes customer records to be erased as inputs in the form of csv files and generates the delete statements as the output. Listed below are the Interact system tables where customer information can reside, for which delete statements are generated:

Design Time: UACI_XSessResponse

Production DB: UACI_ScoreOverride

UACI_BlackList

Fast Upgrade

IBM Marketing Software version 11 supports the fast upgrade approach. This approach allows upgrades from version 8.6 onwards to version 11.0.1. This aids customers by bypassing the multi-step upgrade. The Fast Upgrade approach is also useful in reducing upgrade downtime. The approach is provided for IBM Marketing Platform, IBM Campaign, IBM Contact Optimization, IBM Marketing Operations, IBM Interact for upgrade from 8.6.x version onwards. For details, refer to the Fast Upgrade documentation released with version 11.0.1.

Interact Simulator coverage analysis

In Interact version 11.0 we introduce a new feature “Simulator Coverage Analysis scenario�?. This is an addition to the existing Simple Scenario and Advanced Scenario features of the Simulator. Interact has built a simulator in Design Time to enable marketers test run a simulation for a customer and know if the offers, events, event patterns and strategies they defined work as they expect.

The marketers often would also like to know if they have enough offer coverage for each group of their customer base, or for certain groups/segments. The users can run the Coverage analysis scenario from Interactive Channel’s Simulator tab. The Coverage Analysis scenario will let the marketer run the coverage analysis for all the audiences in the profile data or they can select a group of audience using the filter criteria. For the selected audience ids and Zones, Interact will invoke the startSession, getOffers and endSession API.

As part of scenario definition you can enable/disable on using the event patterns of existing states and offer suppression rules and test it by running the coverage analysis scenario.

The run results are stored in two tables UACI_SimResults_<scenarioID> and UACI_SimResults_< ScenarioID >_Attributes, these are created in Interact Design time database after you save and run the coverage analysis scenario. Interact will maintain a history of all the previously run scenarios where you can view the run history of previous simulation scenarios. You can choose to delete history records if required. The scenario results of the coverage analysis can be exported to a csv file.