Unica Journey-Integration with Salesforce CRM

You’ve spent time and resources attracting and generating new leads, but now what? Are they getting passed on to your sales team, and if so, do your reps know which opportunities are the hottest? Time is of the essence when you’re small and growing fast. Make the most of your marketing tools — email, social, marketing automation just like HCL Unica — by connecting them to a Salesforce CRM platform. Both sales and marketing will have a complete view of leads and prospects to create and target engaging communications to turn prospects into customers and reach key decision-makers faster.

Unica Journey and Salesforce integration will lead to the following benefits:

• Unica Journey will pass the hot and evaluated leads to a Sales representative, which result in a reduced cost of sales.
• A 1-to-1 relationship can be maintained with your leads, and you will be able to provide a personalized experience to your customers.
• The sales cycle would be shortened as Leads (or Contact) would be transferred to a Sales representative at the right time.

With Unica V12.1, HCL added Unica Journey as one of the prominent products in the Unica suite family.  Unica Journey is a goal-based orchestration solution that can craft, execute, and visualize context-driven, personalized, multi-step omnichannel customer experiences. 

With HCL Unica Journey, Markets can:

• Define goals for customer experience 
• Easily adjust journeys in real-time to achieve them. 
• Craft and visualize the entire customer journey across channels/touchpoints and events with a sleek and intuitive Journey Canvas

Unica Journey supports integration with HCL Unica Deliver for email and SMS delivery. It also supports integration with Unica Link for integration with various email and SMS delivery channel and is also used to integrate with Salesforce ® CRM.

With the integration of Unica Journey with Salesforce, the following objects in Salesforce can be created or updated:

• Contact
• Leads

Pre-requisites

To configure the Salesforce connector for this integration, the following details are required from your Salesforce org (account) for generating instance URL and access token:

• Username
• Password
• Client ID
• Client Secret 

Follow the below steps to generate an ‘access token’:

1. Create a ‘Connected App’ in Salesforce org (account) by following the below steps:

• Log in to Salesforce as an administrator. In the drop-down list of the account (in the upper-right corner), select Setup.
• In the left-hand pane, go to Apps > App Manager.
• Click on the New Connected App (in the upper right corner).
• On the New Connected App page, fill the following required fields under Basic Information.
• Go to API (Enable OAuth Settings), and select Enable OAuth Settings. In the Callback URL field, enter https://login.salesforce.com/. In the Selected OAuth Scopes field, select Access and manage your data (API), Perform requests on your behalf at any time (refresh_token, offline_access), Provide access to your data via the Web (web), and then click Add.
• Click the Save button to save the new Connected App.

• In the Connected Apps (Apps > App Manager) list, find the App that you just created, and then click Manage.
• On the page that opens, click the Edit button. Under OAuth policies, select All users may self-authorize in the Permitted Users list, and then click the Save button.

2. Then access the App you just created via the Connected Apps (Apps > App Manager) list and then click on View.

3. Go to API (Enable OAuth Settings), and note down the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. This will be used for the generation of “access token” used for the configuration of the Salesforce connector.

4. You can use the Postman tool to generate an ‘access token’ by providing the below parameters.

5. If you are familiar with ‘curl,’ you can use that for generating ‘access token’ by sending the following curl:

curl -X POST https://<YOUR_INSTANCE>.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token?code=<CODE>&grant_type=authorization_code&client_id=<CONSUMER_KEY>&client_secret=<CONSUMER_SECRET>&redirect_uri=https://login.salesforce.com/

The output would be as below:

{
"access_token":"00D2v000001XKxi__SOMETHING",
"refresh_token":"5Aep861dlMxAL.LhVTuPRa__SOMETHING",
"signature":"MK/YGMNQhPSSnKtYicXlaU__SOMETHING",
"scope":"refresh_token web api",
"instance_url":"https://ap15.salesforce.com",
"id":"https://login.salesforce.com/id/00D2vKxiEAG/0045Q09vAAL",
"token_type":"Bearer",
"issued_at":"1570030000198"
}

This output would give both ‘access token’ and ‘instance URL,’ which is required for configuring Salesforce connector in Unica Journey.

NOTE: Make sure that the validity of the token is for a longer duration. Otherwise, you will have to generate the access token very frequently as it expires after a certain duration.

Process

How to configure Salesforce connector in Unica Journey

1. Login to Unica Journey using admin access and navigate to Setting ➡️ Link ➡️ Manage Connections ➡️ Create New.
2. Provide ‘Name’ to the connector and click on ‘Next.’
3. From the list of the ‘Connection Type’ available, select ‘Salesforce’ and then click on ‘Next.’
4. On the ‘Connection Properties’ screen, provide ‘Instance URL’ and ‘Access Token,’ which was retrieved by following the process mentioned in the ‘Pre-requisite’ section.
5. Then click on ‘Fetch’ to retrieve the Version for Salesforce Instance you are using.
6. After selecting Version, click on ‘Test’ to check the connectivity with your Salesforce account (Org).
7. Once tested successfully, click on ‘Save’ so that the connector would be created and would be available for usage in Journeys created afterward.

How to use Salesforce Touchpoint in Unica Journey

1. Create a Data Definition along with the fields which you wanted to send to Salesforce for creation (or updating) of Leads or Contact. While declaring the fields for Data Definition to be consumed by Journey, which sends data to Salesforce for Leads or Contact creation, should make sure that the mandatory fields declared in Salesforce’s Leads and Contact object must exist in this Data Definition. Otherwise, the data insertion in Salesforce would fail. It is advisable to check with your Salesforce Administrator before creating Data Definition in Unica Journey to avoid that situation. Example… For Leads object in Salesforce, Standard required fields are LastName, Company, and status. For the Contact object in Salesforce, LastName is the only Standard field that is mandatory. 

NOTE: It might be the case that while customizing these objects in Salesforce, your Business User or Administrator might have added custom fields that might be marked as ‘Required.’ You need to get this list beforehand so that those mandatory fields would be created in Unica Journey’s Data Definition.

2. Create an Entry Source where you can feed the data for new Leads or Contact which you wanted to send to Salesforce for further processing.

3. Create a new Journey that will consume the Data Definition and Entry Source created above.

4. For sending data to Salesforce, you need to use the ‘Salesforce’ touchpoint in the Journey.

5. Following configurations need to be done in the Salesforce touchpoint:

• Name to the Touchpoint. Ex. Leads to SFDC
• Select the appropriate Salesforce connection, which is done in the ‘Pre-requisite’ section.
• In the Properties section, you need to select Object Action (either Create Object or Update Object) and Object Type (either Leads or Contact) based on your requirement.
• On-Field Mapping page, Salesforce Fields would be displayed on the left-hand side, whereas on the right-hand side, you will get a drop-down, which will have the Journey Fields list been defined in the Data Definition assigned to this Journey.
• You need to do the appropriate mapping so that relevant data should be stored in the appropriate fields of the Leads/Contact object of Salesforce.
• Ensure that you at least map Salesforce’s required fields (marked as * under Salesforce Fields section) so that there will not be any failure while creating records in Salesforce. Refer to the below screenshot for reference from Journey’s field Mapping screen:

6. Once all other configurations are complete, you are Publish the Journey. Whenever the Entry Source receives the data, it would flow through the Journey, and required action would be taken in Salesforce (like creation or update of Leads or Contact record). Refer to the below screen from Salesforce, where you will see that new Leads got created:

This way, Unica Journey would be able to send data to Salesforce CRM. As Journey’s events are always real-time, prompt action would be taken in Salesforce. This will lead to an improved conversion rate, which in turn results in improved customer retention. To understand more about it, you can have a read to our Product Guide, and you can even reach out to us for any more queries, and we will be happy to help.