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Administrator Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
Understanding the Interact API
Unica 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.
Designing the Unica Interact API integration
Building your Unica Interact API integration with your touchpoint requires some designing before you can begin implementation. You need to work with your marketing team to decide on where in your touchpoint you want the runtime environment to serve offers (define your interaction points) and what other kind of tracking or interactive functionality you want to use (define your events).
Points to consider
When you design an interaction, keep in mind the effects that no eligible offer, an unreachable runtime server, process timing have on the interaction. Be specific when you define offer rejections. Consider the optional product features that can enhance the interaction.

Administrator Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
- Administering Interact
  When you administer Unica 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.
- Security Management
  Access to the Unica Interact runtime User Interface requires authentication. Only the Login IDs defined in Unica Platform and having Unica Interact admin role can access the pages.
- Configuring users
  Unica Interact requires you to configure two sets of users, runtime environment users and design environment users.
- Managing Unica Interact data sources
  Unica Interact requires several data sources to function properly. Some data sources contain the information Unica Interact requires to function, other data sources contain your data.
- Offer serving
  You can configure Unica Interact in many ways to enhance how it selects offers to present. The following sections describe these optional features in detail.
- Understanding the Interact API
  Unica 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.
  - Interact API dataflow
    This example shows how the API works between your touchpoint and the runtime environment. The visitor takes only four actions - log in, navigate to page that displays offers, select an offer, and log out. You can design your integration to be as complicated as you need, within the limits of your performance requirements.
  - Simple interaction planning example
    In this example, you are designing an interaction for a cellular phone company's website. You create three different offers, set up logging for the offers, assign treatment codes to the offer, and show a series of pictures that link to the offers.
  - Designing the Unica Interact API integration
    Building your Unica Interact API integration with your touchpoint requires some designing before you can begin implementation. You need to work with your marketing team to decide on where in your touchpoint you want the runtime environment to serve offers (define your interaction points) and what other kind of tracking or interactive functionality you want to use (define your events).
    - Points to consider
      When you design an interaction, keep in mind the effects that no eligible offer, an unreachable runtime server, process timing have on the interaction. Be specific when you define offer rejections. Consider the optional product features that can enhance the interaction.
    - API Authentication
      This feature provides you the option to enable authentication on Unica Interact API calls. When it is enabled, Unica Interact RT checks if an incoming API request has a valid authentication token, if not, it authenticates it using the supplied username and password with Unica Platform or LDAP. The request is rejected if the token is not valid and username / password is not valid. Each token has a non-extendable lifetime of the Unica Interact session cache becomes timeout. The token is tied with the session-Id, which is provided during the startSession() API call. So all the other API calls validate this token before proceeding. This feature is disabled by default.
- Managing the Unica Interact API
  Whenever you use the startSession method, you create a Unica Interact runtime session on the runtime server. You can use configuration properties to manage the sessions on a runtime server.
- Classes and methods for the Unica Interact API
  The following sections list requirements and other details you should know before you work with the Unica Interact API.
- Classes and methods for the Interact JavaScript API
  The following sections list requirements and other details you should know before you work with the Unica Interact JavaScript API.
- About the ExternalCallout API
  Unica 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.
- Unica Interact utilities
  This section describes the administrative utilities available with Unica Interact.
- About the Learning API
  Unica 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.
- Interact WSDL
  The Unica 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 Unica Interact home directory, and an example is shown here.
- Interact runtime environment configuration properties
  This section describes all the configuration properties for the Unica Interact runtime environment.
- Unica Interact Simulator
  This section describes all the configuration properties for the Unica Interact simulator.
- Interact design environment configuration properties
  This section describes all the configuration properties for Unica Interact design environment.
- Real-time offer personalization on the client side
  There may be situations where you want to provide real-time offer personalization without implementing low-level Java™ code or SOAP calls to the Unica 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. Unica 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 Unica Interact.
- JVM parameters
- Unica Interact and Digital Recommendations integration
  Unica Interact can integrate with IBM Digital Recommendations to provide Unica 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. Unica 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, Unica 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.
- Interact and DDX integration
  With Digital Data Exchange, your website can link to Unica 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.
- Unica Interact and Unica Journey integration
- Unica Interact and Unica Deliver integration
- Configure gateways
  Use triggered message gateways to send offer information from outbound channels.

Points to consider

When you design an interaction, keep in mind the effects that no eligible offer, an unreachable runtime server, process timing have on the interaction. Be specific when you define offer rejections. Consider the optional product features that can enhance the interaction.

When you are designing your interaction:

Create some default filler content: Create default filler content, a benign branding message or empty content, for every interaction point where offers can be presented. This filler content is used when there are no offers eligible to be served to the current visitor in the current situation. You assign this default filler content as the default string for the interaction point.

Include an alternative method of presenting content: Include some method of presenting content in case your touchpoint cannot reach the runtime server group for some unforeseen reason.

Consider the time that running flowcharts takes: When you trigger events that resegment your visitor, including postEvent and setAudience, keep in mind that running flowcharts does take some amount of time. The getOffers method waits until segmentation is finished before the getOffers method runs. Overly frequent resegmentation can hinder getOffers call response performance.

Decide what an "offer rejection" means: Several reports, such as the Channel Offer Performance Summary report, present the number of times an offer is rejected. This report shows the number of times a postEvent triggered a Log Offer Rejection action. You need to determine whether the Log Offer Rejection action is for an actual rejection, such as clicking a link labeled No, thanks. Or is Log Offer Rejection action for an offer that is ignored, such as a page that displays three different banner ads, none of which are selected.

Decide which offer selection features to use

There are several optional features you can use to enhance Unica Interact offer selection. These features include:

Learning
Offer suppression
Individual offer assignments
Other elements of offer serving

You need to determine how many, if any, of these optional features would enhance your interactions.

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