Interact workflow

When you configure Interact, you use a workflow to outline the process from an idea to deployment in detail. Configuring Interact is a multi-step, multi-person, iterative process. The process from an idea to deployment can be broken into three major components: design, configuration, and testing.

Design-During the design phase you brainstorm about what kinds of interactive marketing strategies you would like to use. After you have an idea about what you want to have happen in your touchpoint, you need to determine how to implement that with Interact. This brainstorming is a cooperative effort between the person managing the touchpoint and the person designing the marketing plan. Using business goals and target metrics, they can create a list of interaction points and zones, and a rough list of segmentation and suppression strategies. These discussions should also include the data required to perform the segmentation.

Configuration-During the configuration phase the touchpoint administrator and a Interact user implement the design. The Interact user defines offer-to-segment assignments and configures the interactive channel within the design environment while the touchpoint administrator configures the touchpoint to work with the runtime server using the Interact API. Your data administrator needs to configure and create the data tables required for both testing and production.

Testing-As you finish configuring Interact in the design environment, you mark the various components for deployment to staging runtime environments. The Interact administrator deploys the configuration to the staging servers and the testing can begin. All members of the team involved with designing the Interact implementation review the results to confirm the configuration is performing as designed and the performance of the runtime environment is within tolerable limits for response time and throughput.

Users may need to make some changes and more testing may need to be performed. Once everyone is pleased by the results, the manager can mark the configuration for deployment to production servers.

At this time, the touchpoint manager may review all the results as well, to ensure that the configuration will have no adverse effects on the customer-facing system. Once the configuration has approval from all parties, it can be deployed to production runtime servers.

The following diagram shows a sample design workflow. While this diagram shows a linear progression, in practice, many people can be working on different components at the same time. It is also an iterative process. For example, to configure the touchpoint to work with Interact using the Interact API, you must reference events created in the interactive channel. As the touchpoint administrator configures the touchpoint in the runtime environment, the administrator may realize that more events are needed. A Interact user then needs to create these events in the design environment.

Interact workflow in the design environment

The first task is to design the interaction. Next, create interaction points, zones, events, and categories in the interactive channel. The touchpoint administrator uses the names of the interaction points and events with the Interact API to configure the touchpoint.

Continue to configure the interaction, creating interactive flowcharts in Campaign sessions and defining offers.

After you have created all your zones, offers, and segments, you can create treatment rules on the Interaction Strategy tab of a campaign. This is where you assign offers to segments per zone. You may also take the time to assign target and control cells on the Target Cells tab.

The interaction is now complete and can be deployed to a staging server for testing.