Capabilities rolling out in March 2022

Capabilities rolling out in March 2022

Rules Screen

Rule Designer

Delete Multiple Tiles

Selecting multiple tiles allows you to delete them all with a single click on the Delete button.

CTRL-V shortcut for Tile copy

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

Highlight when rule validation is occuring

When changes are made to a Rule we will now highlight in the Errors section of the ribbon bar that validation is occuring. 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 when this occurs.

Field Mapping

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

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

Data Helper for Date Fields

Most dates are handled internally by Alterian CX. In some specific cases a date is required as a Constant. As the ISO format required by Alterian CX is tricky to calculate we provide a helper that allows the selection of a date and time and applies 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.

Templates

Template Help Links for Public Templates

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.

This will make it very easy for example to switch from Dev to Test to Production Rules.

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 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.

The Public templates that feed data to Engine have been upgraded to contain a parameter (AlterianQueue_customerAttributeTable) that references a table* with the CXID 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

Idealised Journeys have been renamed Journey Playbooks to better represent their use in alleviating CX problems and planning.

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 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 upgarde, 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.