Planning your visitor interaction

When you plan the design of your Unica 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 Unica 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?"

This question has an almost unlimited number of answers, for example:
  • 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 Unica Interact

After the team identifies the strategy, you list and define what configuration components the Unica Interact user creates in Unica Interact. The Unica Interact user must coordinate with the Unica Interact administrator to define what interaction points and events must be created with the Unica 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 Unica Interact Administrator's Guide.

Consider performance

Since performance is a part of Unica 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 Unica Interact Administrator's Guide.