Contact Optimization sessions

A Contact Optimization session is a combination of rules and scores that apply to a set of proposed contacts.

To begin using HCL® Contact Optimization, you must create a Contact Optimization session.

A Contact Optimization session works at a single audience level, for example, customer, household, and account audience levels. If your company uses HCL Campaign to communicate with contacts at different audience levels, you must create a Contact Optimization session for each audience level that you want to optimize.

You might choose to create smaller Contact Optimization sessions for particular types of campaigns, for a particular branch or division of your company, for example. You might use Contact Optimization to optimize within a single campaign by:

• Managing exclusions
• Using contact history to prevent contact fatigue
• Ensuring consistent communications over time

A Contact Optimization session contains the rules and constraints to apply. It can also contain scores to use for each proposed transaction. Scores represent the value of a proposed transaction. Scores can either be:

• Passed in by each flowchart with their proposed transactions in a score field in the proposed contacts table (PCT).
• Assigned in the Segment/Offer Scores matrix within a Contact Optimization session.

Having individual scores (for example, generated by a predictive model) for each proposed transaction is more likely to yield better optimization results. However, if granular scores are not available, the Score matrix allows you to enter scores that are based on the following values:

• The strategic segment into which a recipient falls
• The offer which it being proposed

This matrix provides the means to rank offers for a particular segment, but there is no distinction among individual recipients within the same strategic segment. That is, everyone in the same segment that gets offer X has the same score Y.

Each Campaign flowchart that participates in a Contact Optimization session submits its proposed contacts for optimization by using the Optimize process. The Optimize process specifies to which optimization session it writes its proposed contacts. A Contact Optimization session can receive proposed contacts from multiple campaigns. Campaign flowcharts determine the eligibility criteria for receiving offers and assign those offers as possible communications to the recipients. Contact Optimization considers all possible contacts to a recipient, including those contacts that are made from other campaigns, and including the contact history of the recipient. Contact Optimization then applies the rules and constraints in the Contact Optimization session to identify the best set of offers to send to that individual.

When the campaign administrators run the Campaign flowcharts, they populate the proposed contacts table (PCT) for your Contact Optimization session. Then, you can run your Contact Optimization session. The Contact Optimization session then applies the rules that you created to optimize the proposed contacts it received from Campaign. The rules exclude a subset of the proposed contacts to form the optimized contact list that you can use in Campaign marketing campaigns.