Capabilities rolling out in May 2022

Rule Designer

Saving Tests

Rules tests can come from two locations.

The first location is the starting tile for the Rule. This is normally a Realtime Input step. Here the Template designer will have added the fields and test data they expected to flow into Rules when using this Template. When testing a Rule, the tests obtained from here will be shown at the top of test list and show with a padlock icon to indicate that these cannot be edited in the UI. In essence any Rule that uses this template has the same test values. This is useful as it provides a starting point for any new Rule developed with it.

The other way to provide test data is to manually add tests. In previous releases newly added tests were not persisted in the Rule. Test Rows added to the Rule are now saved at a Rule level and these can be edited and deleted as required. When the Rule is copied or saved the copies will retain any Tests that were created for the source Rule.

Persist Test Runs

When you run a test, you’ll get lots of useful feedback from the UI. This includes a link to the logs, a indication of response times, the response value and the request submitted. In previous versions running another test, even for a different Test row would remove this feedback for all other tests.

Now we keep the older values until this specific test is rerun. This allows you to run a series of tests and only rerun the ones that fail.

Rule Designer

We have had help links on our templates for a while. This link was not present in the Template Details screen within Rules Designer. We have added this as it is useful to understand why a Templates was used and what it could do.

Data Validation

The quality of the decisions made by Rules are determined by the data that is passed into and used by them. We currently have “Rule Health” functionality that lets our users know where a Rule may be failing. Failures include Rules timing out and errors in the running of the Rule.

We are now providing another way to identify issues with your Rules. In this use case it’s not due to the Rule failing, it’s based on the quality of the data being passed into the Rule. Is the data of the correct quality and the correct format? We are calling this “Data Health”.

We now have Public Templates that will:

• Validate whether the fields in the Rule flow meet the correct criteria = Validate Tracking Data

• Allow data failing validation to be exported allowing you to identify why they are failing = Invalid Data S3 Output

• Provide an indication in the call response when an invocation has failed.

Our actionable Public Templates have been updated to allow the user to choose whether an Invocation failing validation should still trigger an action or whether it should be ignored.

Opportunities

General improvements to the Opportunities screen including, search by Rule Name, improved horizontal spacing and right click options for the initiatives.

Public Templates

Get CXID

When a parse campaign tracking tag template is used the GETCXID Public template will now act differently to provided more accurate information.

We will use the AlterianCX_inboundMedium field as a the channel and AlterianCX_inboundSource as the Channel Source.

Direct is now used as the event location if one is not provided.

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 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 onto conversions and other interactions. Find out more here

Parse campaign tracking tags

The parse campaign tracking tags public template will take query string parameters provided by 3rd party tracking solutions like Google AdWords and it will parse these values out into specific Alterian fields. These fields can then be used to identify where an individual arrived from or to measure the success of Rules in driving conversion.

Running Campaign Rules in Alterian CX

Rules are built to meet various CX requirements. Influencer Rules provide an action or decision back from Alterian CX creating an active way to influence an individual’s next action. This could be sending an email, selecting a specific target banner, the correct call centre script, or an abandon basket SMS.

In each case you are influencing customer decisions or educating them, so they move down a journey that is beneficial to them and helps in time to meet your business goals.

To make this process easier we now support the collection and reporting on standard Google UTM tags. These tags can be collected from email campaigns or gathered from referrers or new tags added to outbound Rules developed internally to enable easier reporting.

Validate Tracking Data

Please see Data Validation above

Invalid Data S3 Output

Please see Data Validation above

Steps / Plugins

Log Level

Logs are currently set at a basic level. When triaging an issue within a Rule it’s often useful for Technical resources to get more detailed logs. This can now be set at a Rule level by changing the Rule Metadata to contain a different log level. This is controlled by "logLevel": "ROWLEVEL" as an example.

DDE Plugin

Clients and other selectable items are now shown alphabetically.

Journey Analytics

Addition of Channel; to Journey Visualisation Filters

It is now possible to filters the rows under consideration for the Journey Visualisation to those on one or more Channels with the inclusion to Channel as one of the attribute filter options. This feature gives more flexibility to focus on the Journeys that involve a defined set of Channels to reduce the view to those Channels.

Auto-Calculate Toggle Option on Journey Visualisation

A new toggle option has been added to Journey Visualisation to disable auto-calculate when editing filters or opening a Journey Visualisation, either new or saved. The default for the new feature is auto-calculate off to avoid unnecessary processing on creation and when performing multiple filter changes, but can bet set at a single visualisation level to allow saved documents to calculate on opening.

Addition of a “Direct” label to Channel Source

In addition to displaying the Channel Source for the beginning on conversation, such as the search engine used, this option will now display “Direct” as a Channel Source, when conversation or visitor streams have started from a blank referrer such as bookmarks.

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.