Track
Use the Track process to update the contact statuses or additionally tracked fields for existing records in contact history.
The Track process can update existing rows in contact history or it can create new rows.
For example, if records were initially written to contact history with a contact status of "Proposed," you can use the Track process to later update records in contact history that were contacted, with a contact status of "Contacted." Or, for example, if all contacts who were sent a direct mail were written to contact history with a contact status of "Contacted" and you later received a list of undeliverable mailings, you could update individuals on that list with contact statuses of "Undeliverable."
You can use the Track process to log contact information to the contact history tables, separate from the contact process that generated the list of contacts. For example, you might not want to write your initially-generated contact list to contact history because your mail house will perform post-processing on the list, removing invalid and duplicate addresses. If you wait for the mail house to send you a confirmation list of IDs to which they actually sent offers, your contact history will be more accurate. In this case, your input to the Track process will be the final mailing list used by the mail house after they performed post-processing.
Additionally, there are times when the target list is large, and it is not necessary to load all of this information into contact history. Instead, you can log only those contacts who were actually contacted. Often, an organization does not know who was contacted and who was not is not known until you receive feedback from call centers or mailing houses. You can use the Track process so that when feedback is received from different sources you can insert it into the contact history tables.
For details about logging contacts to contact history, see About contact history.
You can also use the Track process to record contact information in real time. For example, you can use it to record offers that were made over the telephone during a call. Using Campaign Interact, when a call center phone representative makes an offer to a customer over the phone, they might click a button to indicate that offer was made. That information can immediately be sent to the Track process, where it is recorded, or it can be accumulated and periodically processed in batch mode. For more information on the use of the Track process in Campaign Interact, see the documentation provided with Interact.
Examples
You can create two separate flowcharts to take advantage of the Track process's delayed writing to contact history. You create your contact list in Flowchart 1: A Select process selects data, provides input to a Segment process, where the data is segmented by value tier, then outputs the segmented data to a Mail List process. You configure the Mail List process only to output a list of IDs to a file, without logging contact history, because you want the contact list to undergo post-processing by the mail house.
You create Flowchart 2 to handle the final contact list returned to you by the mail house, and finally to write the actual contacts to contact history. Flowchart 2 consists of a Select process whose input is the list of customers who were actually contacted by the mail house, connected to a Track process which then writes the information to contact history.
In a variation of this example, if instead of returning a list of contacted IDs, the mail house returns a list of IDs that could not be contacted, you can obtain the list of contacted IDs by selecting the original output contact list from Flowchart 1 and suppressing the undeliverables (provided by the mail house) using a Merge process. The output from the Merge process is then your list of contacted IDs, and these can be passed to a Track process for writing to contact history.
To configure a Track process
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