Unica Interact - Real-Time Attributes

Real-time marketing has become one of the most important marketing techniques in today’s consumer world. Real-time decision-making can be most effective when you exploit given customer interaction by capturing a variety of valuable data.  

Unica Interact has a great feature called ‘Real Time Attributes’ which helps to capture more and more meaningful real-time data and then use the same in decision logic.

What is it?

Unica Interact can handle dynamic values for attributes, where values are set or updated at the moment the interaction happens, such as the total amount of a shopping cart, the current location of the customer, etc. It is a prerequisite to adding the attribute as a profile column in the mapped table. Even if an attribute is to be provided via API parameters or other sources, the attribute name must be manually added into profile table columns.

With the introduction of ‘Real-Time Attributes, if the marketer wants to use a new attribute in the segmentation logic at Flowchart as well as Strategy level, then there is no need to add the same in the profile table columns.

How will it help?

Consider a scenario for an Insurance company where the marketer wants to capture a ‘keyword’ from real-time transactions to determine the insurance segment for a particular customer and then present him the best offer accordingly. Now with traditional Unica Interact, this new attribute has to exist in the mapped profile table in order to create an expression in flowcharts or strategies.

It is an unnecessary hassle for the marketer to add a corresponding column in the profile table, again map the table, and then use the attribute in an expression.

Real-Time attributes will make the life of a marketer easier. A marketer will be able to create, manage and use such attributes without adding those in profile tables.

These real-time attributes are available globally and across Interactive Channels.

How does it work?

Let’s see the step-by-step usage of real-time attributes in Unica Interact. Here are high-level steps :

• Define an RTA (aka Real Time Attribute)
• Use the RTA in an expression
• Deploy the Interactive Channel to Runtime.
• Pass the value of RTA to the Interact engine using API calls.

1. Define a Global real-time attribute.

The Interact administrator will navigate to the main Interact menu- Global definitions. On this page, click on ‘Add’ and provide details for the new attribute.

You can create an attribute with any of the three supported data types: String, Numeric, and DateTime.

2. We want to use this attribute for segmentation, move to an Interactive flowchart and add decision logic.

Decision process Box.

3. Use the corresponding segments in Strategy treatment rules.

4. Once you use the attribute in any of the components, then the usage is shown.

5. You can now deploy the Interactive channel as usual. 

6. From Interact run time, you can send the real-time attribute’s value like session attributes.

7. If no value is sent for a real-time attribute, then the default value is used in the expression.

8. You can use the Real-time attributes in the following components. Interactive Flowchart, Interaction Strategy, Advanced Options, Interaction Strategy. Parameterized Offer Attributes, Simulator Advanced Scenario.

All real-time attributes defined in Unica Interact design-time are deployed to Unica Interact Run-time as part of global data. You can learn more about the real-time attributes from the Product Documentation, and you can also reach out to us, and we would be happy to help.