Managing preferences in Contact Central in Unica Campaign

In the age of privacy rules and regulations, you need to be cautious about customer data and preferences. To manage this, you need a tool that can capture the audience’s consent and preferences. So, we thought of introducing one for you in Unica. We are introducing “Customer Consent” in Unica, which will allow you to capture audience consent. The Customer consent module will be available inside the Contact Central. Contact Central is introduced from Unica v12.1.2. It helps to set the

•  Regional preferences
• Capacity optimization
• To handle the Opts-In Opts-Outs preferences within Unica Campaign, Unica Interact, or Unica Journey using the different channels like Email, Push, SMS or WhatsApp.

For example, 

• Users can define the Channel capacity, like how many maximum communications can be done for a week or in a month.
• To which Region communication can be sent and during which days in a week, For Example, Weekdays excluding weekends or all days in a week, and for which specific time during a week.
• Contact Central can be integrated with Unica Campaign, Unica Interact, and Unica Journey, and the channel is Deliver in Unica suite.

In this blog, we will see the basic integration of Unica Campaign with Unica Contact central and will see a couple of use cases.

Prerequisite

• Contact Central is installed and Configured.
• Ensure that Channels are listed when Clicked on the “ContactCentral” menu on the “Channel Preference” page as below:

Configuration and Integration with Campaign:

• Set the value of contactCentralEnabled = Yes at Affinium|Campaign|partitions|partition1|server|internal
• Create a data source ContactCentral at Affinium|Campaign|partitions|partition1|dataSources|<>
• In the above data source, specify the following values
  ASMUserForDBCredentials = asm_admin
  DSN = <Name of Database where ContactCentral Database is created>
  OwnerForTableDisplay = <Database User name for Contact Central database>

• Create a Datasource ContactCentral under user asm_admin and specify the Database user and password for the Contact Central database.

Integration with Campaign

• “Regional Preferences” drop-down will appear on the Campaign Summary page
• Contact Central is integrated with the Campaign and Deliver process box in the Campaign Flowchart.
• When Deliver Process box is opened, an extra configuration like “Communication Channel” and “Apply Contact Central Consents” will appear as below.
  Communication channel: This is a channel present in Contact Central that will be listed in this drop-down.
  Regional Preference: This is the Preference user set on the Summary page of the Campaign.
  Apply contact Central Consents: Opt-ins or Opt-outs consent from Contact Central for different channels can be applied by checking this checkbox.

UseCase:

Consider a Use case where by Using Contact Central customer want to set the regional Preference as below:

1. Mail should be sent from Deliver only the Monday to Friday between 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
2. No more than 10 emails should be sent in a week.
3. Mails should not be sent to the users who opted Out or Unsubscribe from Mail or other channels from Deliver. 

Steps for the above scenarios:

Steps for UseCase 1 and 2:

– Create a Regional Preferences from “ContactCentral” Menu > “Regional Preferences” Tab by clicking “+Regional preferences” button.

– Create a Channel Preference as below for Monday To Friday and select the time duration Day Start as 10:00 and Day End as 18:00.

– Create a Campaign, and in “Regional Preferences,” drop-down select the Regional Preference created in Contact Central as below:

– In a Campaign as the Regional Preference is set, only this Regional Preference will be available in all the Flowcharts (Deliver process boxes)
– Create a Flowchart and add a Deliver Processes Box and configure it for “Communication Channel” and “Apply Contact Central Consents.”
– Run the Flowchart in Production Mode to create and populate the OLT.
– Now, create an Email Template, Mailing in deliver, and take the input from the OLT created by the above run of flowchart.
– As the Time to send emails is set as 10:00 AM to 18:00 PM, only Monday to Friday mailings will be sent only during this duration.
– If Mailing is sent after 18:00 hrs, it will give the error as below:

Could not complete the requested operation.
Cannot send message outside business hours as per regional preference. Please check contact Central.

– As we set the rule of a maximum of 10 Mails in a Week, if we try to send more than 10 emails within a week, it again fails with the below error.

Could not complete the requested operation.
Email channel does not have enough capacity for sending message. Please check contact Central.

Steps for UseCase 3:

• Send a mail to contacts from the OLT created using the Deliver Processes.
• This Mail should have the Unsubscribed configured for a couple of Mails. Note: Please refer following to understand Unsubscribing Email from Deliver: https://blog.hcltechsw.com/unica/unsubscribing-email-in-unica-deliver/
• When users unsubscribe the mail after receiving it, in this case, all users who unsubscribe the Emails will come under Opt-Out, and those not unsubscribes will come under Opts-in. It will be listed under “Customer Consent” for respective channels as below.

• If Mailing is executed again, in this case, all users who come under the Opt-Out group will not receive the Mail.

To understand more about how Contact Central work, you can refer to the product documentation.