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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.
Unica Interact key concepts
Unica Interact is an interactive engine that targets personalized marketing offers to various audiences.
Interactive channels
Use interactive channels in Unica Interact to coordinate all the objects, data, and server resources that are involved in interactive marketing.

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.
  - Unica Interact key concepts
    Unica Interact is an interactive engine that targets personalized marketing offers to various audiences.
    - Audience levels
      An audience level is a collection of identifiers that can be targeted by a campaign. You can define audience levels to target the correct set of audiences for your campaign.
    - Design environment
      Use the design time environment to configure various Unica Interact components and deploy them to the runtime environment.
    - Events
    - Interactive channels
      Use interactive channels in Unica Interact to coordinate all the objects, data, and server resources that are involved in interactive marketing.
    - Interactive flowcharts
      Use interactive flowcharts to divide your customers into segments and assign a profile to a segment.
    - Interaction points
      An interaction point is a place in your touchpoint where you want to present an offer.
    - Offers
      An offer represents a single marketing message, which can be delivered in various ways.
    - Target cell
    - Profiles
      A profile is the set of customer data that is used by the runtime environment. This data can be a subset of the customer data available in your customer database, data that is collected in real time, or a combination of the two.
    - Runtime environment
      The runtime environment connects to your touchpoint and performs interactions. The runtime environment can consist of one or many runtime servers that are connected to a touchpoint.
    - Runtime sessions
      A runtime session exists on the runtime server for each visitor to your touchpoint. This session holds all the data for the visitor that the runtime environment uses to assign visitors to segments and recommend offers.
    - Touchpoints
      A touchpoint is an application or place where you can interact with a customer. A touchpoint can be a channel where the customer initiates the contact (an "inbound" interaction) or where you contact the customer (an "outbound" interaction).
    - Treatment rules
      An Interactive channel can have multiple marketing strategies. A Strategy, key focal point of Interact application, consists of a set of treatment rules. Treatment rules are also called Smart rules in Interact after version 12.0. Treatment rules assign an offer to a smart segment. These assignments are further constrained by the custom-defined zone that you associate with the offer in the treatment rule.
    - FlexOffers
    - Gateways
  - Unica Interact architecture
    The Unica Interact environment consists of at least two major components, design environment and the runtime environment. You may have optional testing runtime servers as well.
  - Unica Interact network considerations
    A production installation of Unica Interact spans at least two machines. In a high-volume production environment, with several Unica Interact runtime servers and distributed databases, your installation might span dozens of machines.
  - Unica Interact server ports and network security
    Configure Unica Interact t to secure your server ports.
  - Logging in Interact
- 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.
- 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.

Interactive channels

Use interactive channels in Unica Interact to coordinate all the objects, data, and server resources that are involved in interactive marketing.

An interactive channel is a representation in Unica Interact of a touchpoint where the method of the interface is an interactive dialog. This software representation is used to coordinate all of the objects, data, and server resources that are involved in interactive marketing.

An interactive channel is a tool that you use to define interaction points and events. You can also access reports for an interactive channel from the Analysis tab of that interactive channel.

Interactive channels also contain production runtime and staging server assignments. You can create several interactive channels to organize your events and interaction points if you have only one set of production runtime and staging servers, or to divide your events and interaction points by customer-facing system.

You can extend an interactive channel, from an existing interactive channel, to reuse marketing objects. Currently, an interactive channel extends only existing Events and Event Patterns.

Some features of interactive channels are as follows:

An interactive channel uses all marketing objects defined in the parent interactive channels or grandparent interactive channels.
The relationship is always a multi-level relationship and never a cyclic relationship.
You can view and edit the marketing objects, defined in the parent interactive channel, from the same UI.
The system deploys each interactive channel separately.
If the deployment of the parent interactive channel occurs at run-time, the marketing objects of the parent interactive channel are considered.

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