Content Comparison

Capabilities rolling out in March 2022

Rules Screen

Copy to - Defaults to expected selection

When copying Rules between your targets certain movements are more likely. Test to Development for example. The defaults have been changed to reflect the most chosen paths.

Rule Designer

Test

When you create a new Rule or adjust an existing Rule the pivotal next step is to test to understand whether it provides the correct action or correct decisions based on the data passed in.

Previously Rule testing within Alterian CX was solely provided via the Rule API Testing functionality. Although this is serviceable it’s not conducive to testing lots of test variations and it does not provide any actionable feedback on what happened in the Rule and what may be going wrong.  

To meet this user requirement Test functionality has been added to Rule Designer.

Clicking on Test in the Ribbon bar will open the Test Screen.  To provide a seamless view of the results of the tests, Test sits alongside both the Logs and the Errors Screens.

To run a Test simply click “Run” and we will submit the current test data. If you have multiple tests lined up clicking on “Run All” will run all your tests in turn saving time and effort.

After the Test has been submitted, we return five elements of information that allow you to understand whether the Rule ran correctly and provided the expected response back. We provide Status code, Time in milliseconds, Request Value or response, Integrated logs and we also provide a link through to all the logs created by that test to enable easy triage of any issues.

Delete Multiple Tiles

Selecting After selecting multiple tiles allows you to can now delete them all with a single click on the keyboard Delete button.

CTRL-V shortcut for Tile copy

If you have selected With multiple Tiles selected you can now use the standard keyboard shortcut Ctrl-V to paste the Tiles onto on to the Canvas. The Tiles will be pasted in order at the nearest location that will fit them in order. In essence where other Tiles do not have to be moved to accomodate accommodate the Tiles being pasted.

Highlight when rule validation is

occurring

When changes are made to a Rule, we will now highlight in the Errors section of Icon on the ribbon bar that validation is occuringoccurring. You can still make further changes and work on the rule while it’s validating but it’s useful for the user to understand if the changes made at this point have been successfully validated and that no errors exist. The errors icon has also been updated to explicitly state no errors “no errors” when this occurs.

Field Mapping

The Field Mapping or Fields screen has been changed to allow a third option of No Mapping“No Mapping”.

Previously we allowed the user to map fields togather or set a constant. In many scenarios the field a field highlighted as missing in the Rule is optional and is simply not required for the rule to function. You can now simply choose “No Mapping” to ignore this Rulefield.

Date Helper for Date Fields

Most dates are handled internally by Alterian CX. In some specific cases a date is required as a Constantconstant. As the ISO format required by Alterian CX is tricky to calculate, we now provide a helper that allows the selection of user to select a date and time and applies we then apply the value in the correct format.

If only a date is required, we suggest creating the Rule to require midnight on the selected date and require this to be selected by the user.

Template

A Template can be provided with a help link when it is uploaded.

This allows us to show a help link icon against the Templates in the Templates and Templates selection screens. In essence in the locations where you are trying to decide which Template to use you now have the ability to click and get clear information on the Templates and what they do.

Help links have been added to all our Public Templates. Clicking on the link will open the help in a separate tab.

Global Parameters

Where a Global Parameter is marked as confidential, we will store any value provided but we will not allow the value to be viewed or extracted again for security reasons. The value will continue to work but it is not available for review in the user interface.

We have made further security changes so when a Rule containing a Confidential Parameter is downloaded, we will redact the Confidential values in the downloaded item. The user will need to manually add these values back where required for review, development or testing.

Rule and Rule Group Aliases

To get the most out of the Alterian CX tools we encourage our customers to follow a Rule rollout strategy incorporating Dev, Test and finally Prod. This ensures that the Rules that make it to Production have been sufficiently tested. Importantly this also allows Rules to be improved and tailored to ensure the data they produce is of good quality.

This Dev, Test, Prod process requires that sister rules in different Targets are invoked in turn as part of the rollout strategy. Customers have had difficulty getting the right resources to change tags in the time frames required.

Aliases has been designed to make this process easier. You can now assign an Alias to a Rule or Rule Group. You can then change the Rule or Rule Group assigned to the alias.

Selection Screen

The Filters in the Template selection screen are now persisted.

Download Rule provides option to download last saved or current version

When downloading the Rule as a file, you can choose to download the last saved version or the version currently showing on the canvas. This is useful if changes to the Rule stop it from saving but you want to triage what has gone wrong.

Customer Attribute Information

As individuals interact with your Rules, we gather useful information on the decisions made by the Rule, the location of the rule and details on the individual interacting.

Our journey tracking graphs use this information to show your users Journeys across various interaction points, these could be viewing various pages on a website, an interaction with a call centre or clicking through an email.

The question our customers come up with most is “Why” was that Journey followed or “Why” was that offer the one that generated a conversion?

The more information we know about a Individual the better we understand why these things occurred.

We are introducing have introduced the concept of Customer Attribute data. This allows our customers to upload information on your customers to Alterian CX and have this information automatically available for Custom Dashboards and for filtering the Journey Analytics screens. See details below.

The Public templates that feed data to Engine have been upgraded to contain a parameter (AlterianQueue_customerAttributeTable) that references a table* with the CXID Customer Experience ID as the key.

Once the Customer Attribute table has been configured, each time an event is passed to Alterian Journey Analytics any data from the Customer Attribute Table linked to the corresponding Customer Experience ID will also get passed through.

As long as you keep the Customer Attribute Table up to date you will be able to understand much more clearly “who” does what and why.

For example you would be able to filter by customer value decile to see how your bigger spending users interact with your website or use customer type to identify why one offer may have been better than another.

*Please contact Alterian Support to organise the creation of this table and to discuss how to keep the information up to date in the most performant manner.

Cache Expiry Times

Data stored in the Alterian Cache is used for varied purposes; it could be your current favourite category, your churn risk, your email address or your preference information.

As can be seen from the examples above the requirement to keep this data varies hugely over time. Some of the examples could be out of date in a matter of hours and can be safely removed, others should be kept for a long time and always kept up to date.

To ensure your solution is as effective and performant as possible and to meet data protection regulations globally including GDPR we now include automatic “Expiry Time” values on all data fields writing to the cache.

We use the Expiry time simply to highlight how “long” a field value should persist in the cache after it is written or rewritten. When the Expiry time expires, we will automatically remove the value. The Expiry time is referenced in seconds with a minimum of 1 second and a maximum of 20 years.

More details can be found here.

Public Templates

Send SES Emails

Public Template allowing integration with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).

Send SES Email

Engagement Score - Update and Read

In most cases our customers will be interested in how engaged a user is “at this point in time.” This provides the ability to turn around users who may be becoming disengaged or use the current interest to spark suitable offers.

This need requires that we provide an engagement score to reflect the current engagement level of the user to your brand.

Engagement activity that took place months or years ago should not be as significant in the Engagement Score calculation as engagement events created over the last couple of days. Recency adds value to the score.

To create the right data we include an Engagement Score decay function. This will gradually reduce the engagement scores provided by older events with the oldest events decaying the most. This decay function is automatic and means those users that are more active “right now” generally have higher scores than those more active weeks, months and years ago.

Both the Engagment Score Update and Read have been adjusted to now write to two levels of engagement score.

The Field engagementScoreMonthTimeseries provides the Engagement score over the last 36 months or three years. This field will automap to the engagement score field in the Event Queue Public Templates. This replaces the previously automapped Engagement Score field.

EngagementScoreDayTimeseries provides an engagement score over the last 60 days.

So we can take advantage of this new more accurate way of providing an engagement score we will be removing any prior engagment score values stored . The old way of gathering the score anf new one as not compatible so we will be starting again.

This will mean after upgrade the Engagement Dashboard may look different until the Engagement Score values build up again.

Steps / Plugins

Azure Blob Output

We currently have an Amazon S3 output step to allow our customers to pass data seamlessly to Amazon S3. We now have a Microsoft Azure Blob output Step for those customers wanting to use Microsoft infrastructure.

Alterian Sort Rows

When Kettle is used locally it is possible to manipulate multiple rows from a single invoke allowing sorting on the values in each row. Previously Alterian CX would not support his functionality. Alterian CX worked on a Row by Row basis that did not allow comparison between rows and therefore sorting.

This limitation has been removed, and with the Alterian Sort Rows step you can Sort Rows before merging them back into a single field to meet the requirements of the Invoke.

The Row Denormaliser and Normaliser steps provided by Kettle are now supported within Alterian CX to assist where the multiple rows functionality is used.

Idealised Journeys

Public Templates

Is Latest Event Public Template

The create future event Public Template on its own simply creates a trigger for an action to occur at a specified time in the future. The process future event Public Template is needed to read this trigger and provides the mechanism to add actions to it.

In many use cases you only want to pick out the “latest” event created even if you created lots of them.

For example, when creating an abandoned basket email you may trigger a Create Future event each time an item is added to the basket. However, you only ever send a single email 30 mins after the last item is added and the basket is not purchased.

To make this process easier you can now simply pull in the is latest future event public template.This will simply provide two outputs, Latest and Not Latest allowing you to choose the next action.

parse campaign tracking tags

The parse campaign tracking tags public Template works with the referrer value and the query string parameters it may hold to help identify where a user arrived from.

Many outbound messaging and CX campaign tools look to track success by using the standard UTM tags that are championed and used by Google.

This Public Template will review the referrer query string parameters to see if standard UTM tags are present. If they are, we pull them out, re-name them to make them generic for Alterian and make them available as fields in the flow of the Rule.

Identify Email Clickthrough

The Identify Email Clickthrough Public Template has been designed specifically for use with our Email Manager and third party ESP integrations. This Template when used in our standard page tracking Rules looks for an Email recipient arriving on the page through one of our tracked links. It pulls out the identification value we provide in the URL, in this case a parameter called “DDERH”, and we use this value to identify who it is.

This allows us to track the user from the Email onto the website and then on to conversions and other interactions.

Send Plivo SMS

The Send Plivo SMS integration Public Template has been updated.

Public Rules

track-email-manager-email Alterian CX Email Tracking

Many Alterian CX customers also utilise Alterian Email Manager our own ESP. Our Alterian Email Manager customers want to seamlessly and effortlessly track journeys from first interaction with an email through to website and contact centres touchpoints through to conversion and follow-up satisfaction surveys.

CX tracking can now be automatically applied to Email Manager email opens and clickthroughs.

The integration is very user friendly with NO user email tagging required.

The “track-email-manager-email” rule is used as part of the integration in conjunction with our standard tracking rules track-web and track-web-with-conversions. Both of these rules have been updated to enable the improved integration to work.

Steps / Plugins

Process Future events now provides for Test data

The Process Future Events step works in conjunction with the Create Future Event step to allow Rules to be triggered at a chosen time in the Future. Previously Rules starting with a Process Future Event Step were difficult to test because test data could not be added to the step. You now have the option to enter Test Data directly into the Process Future Event step making testing much easier.

Best Practice report will now highlight when potentially slow are placed before Realtime Output Steps

The Spoon “Best Practice report” will now highlight when potentially slow steps are placed before Realtime Output Steps, where a response should be as quick as possible. This minimizes the risk that Rules will timeout if slow steps take a long time.

Journey Playbooks

You can now add a Classification to your Journey Playbook.

This allows you to group Journeys togather when they have similar traits. For example, all LTV CX campaigns could be grouped with LTV as the classification.

You can use the Classification for filtering in the main Journey Playbook screen.

Journey Analytics

As described above, the Alterian CX processing will now have the ability to attach Customer Attribute data to events generated by interactions from your known Customers.

This requires an initial load process of a defied defined and agreed Customer Attribute file into the CX Cache system prior to utilisation of this feature.

*Please contact Alterian Support to organise the creation of this table and to discuss how to keep the information up to date in the most performant manner.

Columns of interest, such as an Age Range value or Customer Value band information, can then be accessed via a new Attribute Filter dialogue to allow more centric views. For example, you could now have a side by side Journey Visualisation display showing how Journey behaviour or channel interaction, differs between your younger or older Customers, or what behaviours you high value Customers display.

This filtering works at a Event level, and queries the Customer Attribute value captured against each event at the time of interaction. This is important to understand, as when filtering, any rows without, for example, an [Age Band] = “20-30”, will not be returned when this filter is active. It is also important to understand when querying older data, that the [Age Band] or other value, is relevant at the time of the event, not at the time of running the query. The query is not current Customer Attribute value, but value at the time the event.

The UI provides a simple “Is one of” AND “Is not one of selection option with multi-select.

IMPORTANT NOTES

• Customer Attribute data to be used in this way must be of a banded nature only, and with a low number of discrete values. So an Age Band column is suitable, but an [Age] column not ideal due to the number of discrete values, or a Customer Value Band but not a single Customer Value for each Customer.

• The previously existing Event Type and Initiative filtering have been moved from the Tool Bar to the Attribute Filter UI. Any saved Journey Visualisation will open as prior to upgardeupgrade, but the selected values will not be visible in the new Attribute Filter UI so should be re-selected after opening and re-saved.

Fixes

Known Issues

Report Issue

To report an issue with the application not detailed here, please contact Technical Support. Please use our Service Desk to report issues.