Planning your visitor interaction
When you plan the design of your Interact implementation, you must consider the following factors: the strategies that you use to interact with your customers, and the data that is required to segment your customers. Designing the Interact implementation requires the coordination of several components.
Determine how to interact with the visitors
The first step of designing the implementation is asking, "How and where do I want to interact with my customers?"
- Are you considering integrating with a website, an interactive voice response (IVR) system, or a point of sale (POS) system?
- Do you want to display banner ads that are based onsite navigation, a list of further choices that are based on previous selections, or money-saving coupons that are based on the current purchases?
Most touchpoints have more than one location available for interaction, so you might need to ask this question several times.
Define the components you configure in Interact
After the team identifies the strategy, you list and define what configuration components the Interact user creates in Interact. The Interact user must coordinate with the Interact administrator to define what interaction points and events must be created with the Interact API.
The team must also consider what offers to present, how you segment the visitors, and what sampling, integration, or tracking strategies to use. The answers to these questions help define what information to create in the profile database. At the same time, consider how to organize the interaction points into groups or zones that are meant to serve a common purpose to fine-tune your offer presentation.
Evaluate extra options
There are several optional features, including offer suppression, learning, individual offer assignments, and score override, which the team might want to implement. Most of these features require specific database tables, and require little or no configuration in the design environment. For more information about these features, see the Interact Administrator's Guide.
Consider performance
Since performance is a part of Interact, the team must consider the data that is required to segment the customers. Since there is a performance impact each time data is retrieved from the database, carefully design the information that is provided for the runtime environments. For more information about designing and maintaining customer data, see the Interact Administrator's Guide.