Capabilities rolling out in February 2022

Capabilities rolling out in February 2022

Rules Screen

Persist Filters

We persist your chosen filters in the Rules screen and this significantly helps our users find the right Rules quickly.

We have broadened this approach to also persist your filters when clicking directly back into Rules from the menu. In previous versions this would automatically reset the filters to provide a clean slate.

To manually reset your selections simply click on the “x” to the right of the filter selections.

Rule Designer

“Free Add “ Mode - Adding tiles in any order

Previously you could only add tiles where they were linked from the output of an existing tile. This was quite limiting stopping our customers from “designing” Rules. This has been improved with “Free Add Mode” allowing you to add tiles wherever you like on the canvas and then linking them togather as required.

To enable “Free Add Mode” simply use the keyboard shortcut ALT-A. This will add lattice points onto the canvas within one Tile spacing of the outermost Tile. Clicking one of the lattice points will open the Template selection screen. Select the Template you require, and it will be added to that location on the Canvas. To leave “Free Add Mode” click on ESC.

Copy, Paste Tiles

Certain sequences of Tiles within your Rules may be required to fulfil business requirements in multiple flows. Instead of adding the Tiles one by one through the standard Template Selection Screen process you can now copy the Tiles you require and paste them where you want them.

You can copy Rules singularly or in sequence. Where a sequence of Tiles is copied, when pasted the tiles will be placed in the order they were initially selected in the copy process.

If the selected “paste” lattice point does not have enough room to the right for all the Tiles to be added in a row it will find a sensible way to place the Tiles in order.

Field Mapping

The Field Mapping or Fields screen has been comprehensively updated. We have introduced filters to make it easier to understand issues with the mappings and a Validity column to highlight clearly what is wrong.

Replace Tiles

We have added the ability to replace a Tile. Simply right click on the Tile select “Replace” from the options and choose a replacement Template from the Template Selection screen.

Canvas

The Canvas previously had an edge. This has been removed as it was clashing with other functionality.

Errors

Rule Validity errors are now shown vertically on the right-hand side of the Rule.

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 occured.

We are introducing the concept of Customer Attribute data. This allows our customers to uploaded 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

Engagment 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.

Dashboards

A new Journey Analytics Dashboard has been introduced to give more visibility of trends and Visitor behaviour across Brands, within the Dashboards section of the Product.

The Journey Analytics “JA Dashboard” provides 5 tab views.

Each Tab provides the following selection options :

Event Stream Selection - At the top left of the Dashboard, this allows view of the data gathered in each Event Stream. This drop-down selector lists Event Streams within the set up, so will contain an Event Stream for each target (Dev, Test, Prod) as well as listing all Brands available the Analyst on a multi-brands set up. Simple check required stream option. This will only display Event Streams where some data is present. Note that this can only display data for single streams. This selection will persist across all tabs.

Date Range Slider - to adjust the range of data for data being viewed, which is also persisted across all Tabs.

Channel Selection

If any tabs do not display data, this may simply be a lack of data in the Date Range selected or that this data does not exist in the system at the time. Some data such as the Conversion Influence, may not be present if the system is not yet started collecting Conversion Data

Engagement

Providing views of Counts by Location of the most popular Locations, and these can be filtered by Channels with a filtered view of Categories and an average Engagement

Category Location

For systems that have implemented Categorisation on their Locations, this page gives more detail on engagement with those Categories and some category transition views.

Conversion Influence

Monitor you defined conversion events in more detail with focus on the Key Influencers for those conversions, to assess what strategies or content are most influential.

Channel

A close up focus on channel interactions from your Visitors and Customers. Pie and line chart visualisation help to easily view the most popular channels for Brand interactions.

Known Identity

Assess if you increasing your volume of known Customers. Are engagement strategies working and whether current strategies are driving unknown Visitors transition to known Visitors to increase their engagement with the Brand.

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.