Seamless communication between Unica Interact and Unica Journey

Marketing has changed its course from cold calling to establishing meaningful relationships with the customers. When a marketer communicates with their customers, they represent their brand; in short, they are the brand’s voice. So the communications need to be clear, consistent, and most importantly, in real-time; that’s how you build valuable relationships. Unica Interact can now seamlessly leverage Unica Journey’s capability to establish a continuous dialog with customers. It helps marketers to establish a meaningful relationship with their customers by triggering special offers based on abandoned shopping carts, repeated page visits, etc. This, in turn, will result in churn prevention and increased ROI.

Using Unica Interact’s Triggered Message functionality, a marketer can acquire, engage, and retain customers throughout the buyer journey by presenting them with offers that suit their needs at the right moment through the right channel. Using out-of-the-box integration, Unica Interact can send specific audience information as well as personalized real-time Marketing messages and Offers to Unica Journey.

Unica Journey then can send a special offer to the customer on various outbound channels.

The article explains the detailed steps involved in setting up integration between Unica Interact and Unica Journey.

Let’s consider a simple use case here.

• The customer visits the online shopping website.
• The customer adds a mobile phone to the cart.
• Due to some reason, the customer abandons the shopping cart.
• The marketer wants to give a 10% discount to the customer to facilitate the purchase.

Problem Statement and Solution.

Traditional Interact marketers will now have to wait for the customer to return to the website/any other inbound channel to give him the discount offer. During this waiting period, the customer may go to some other site, and thus the marketer could lose him. Using the Triggered Message capability, the marketer can decide to give a 10% discount to the customer using any of Unica Journey’s outbound channels. This will ensure that the customer is retained and his journey is tracked using ‘Unica Journey’s powerful capabilities. In the latest HCL Unica Interact release, all the gateway configurations are now available on UI, making it very easy to start using the Journey integration with Interact.

Following are the typical steps involved in setting up a Journey gateway in Unica Interact.

1. Configure the Journey channel in design time.
2. Configure the Journey gateway and channel in run time 
3. Setup Entry source and Data definition in Journey.
4. Retrieve the details from Journey into Interactive Channel.
5. Use the gateway on the Triggered Message tab.

Let’s understand each of the above steps in detail.

Configure the Journey channel in design time.

1. Goto “Affinium|Campaign|partitions|partition1|Interact|outboundChannels”

2. Click on ‘outboundChannel’

3. Give the name of your choice.

Configure the Journey gateway and channel in run time configurations.

1. Goto “Affinium|interact|triggeredMessage|gateways”

2. Click on “Journey.’

3. Give a name to this gateway, say “Journey gateway.”

4. Go inside this gateway and expand the node “Parameter Data.”

5. Add below parameters related to Kafka details of Journey
providerURL
authentication
topic
deliveryTimeoutMillis
validationTimeoutMillis

6. Please add additional ‘Kafka’ parameters as per the authentication mode which you are using. This is mentioned in the ‘Interact Admin guide.’

7. Add a channel with the same name as that was added in section ‘A.’ under “Affinium|interact|triggeredMessage|channels.”

8. Add a handler for this channel and point to the gateway created above.

Setup Entry source and Data definition in Journey.

1. Add an entry source of type ’Interact.’ 

2. Add a data definition with all the required fields.

3. Use this Entry source and data definition in a Journey.

Retrieve the details from Journey into Interactive Channel.

1. Goto the ‘Gateway’ tab in the Interactive Channel, where you want to use this gateway

2. Select ‘Journey Outbound’ from the ‘Gateway’ tab

3. Provide necessary details and move to the next window.

4. On the next page, you will see the fields for ‘Entry Source code’ and ‘Data Definition.’ Interact pulls this data from the Journey instance.

5. You need to select the desired values from the dropdown for both the fields and then click on the ‘Retrieve’ button.

6. At this point, Unica Interact will pull the Journey fields into this gateway, as shown below.

7. You need to map the relevant Interact fields to each of the journey fields. Here you have an option to map profile data, Real-time attributes as well as Offer attributes. Please select the appropriate field as per your requirement.

8. Save the field mapping and the gateway.

Use the channel on the Triggered Message tab.

1. Select the Event or Event pattern as per your requirement for the Triggered Message rule. 

2. Assign the desired offer and then select the Journey channel, as shown below.

3. Once the Interactive channel is deployed to runtime, the triggered message rule will get fired on receipt of the specified event. Interact will send the information to Journey over Kafka as per the fields mapped in the gateway configuration.

Unica Interact ensures a sophisticated real-time interaction. Its seamless interaction with journey has enabled the marketers to communicate with the customers at the right channel and at the right time. To understand and learn more about Unica Interact, you can reach out to us for any more queries, and we will be happy to help.