| April 22, 2019

Deriving Better ROI with ‘Agent Capacity function’ in Contact optimization – Part -1

Smart marketers know that delivering personalised, contextual timely and relevant offers yield better Return on Investment (ROI). It also enhances customer engagement and improves loyalty. Agent Capacity function in Contact Optimization helps marketers segregate high value consumers and extend more relevant offers that leads to a better rate of conversion. It also helps to prevent contact fatigue, and problems arising out of conflicting offers.

How to use Agent capacity function to deliver high value offers to high value customers? Users should follow the below step by step guide to utilize Agent Capacity function.

Creating Agent tables: Agent information table and agent customer relationship table
Defining Agent tables in Optimize Configuration
Create Agent channel
Create Contact Optimize Session providing agent tables and agent channel.
Define Agent Capacity rules in Optimize session
Create Pre-opt flowchart and then run it
Run Optimize session
Run Post opt flowchart to deliver offers to optimized contacts.

For the ease of usage, we shall look at steps from A to D in Part -1 (this post) and steps E to H in the Part -2 A.Agent Tables: You need to create 2 tables: Agent information table and agent customer relationship table

Agent Information: This table will contain agent information. For example there are 3 Agents- A,B,C with agent id 1,2,3. A and B agent have capacity as 3 and agent C have capacity 2. That means each A and B can attend 3 customers and C can attend 2 customers at a time to deliver high value offers. So, total capacity of 3 agents is 8.

Agent customer relationship table: This table defines relationship between agent and customer. For example, Agent A can meet 5 customers with id- 1,2,3,4,5. But since his capacity is only 3 so he can deliver offer to at max 3 customers out of 5. These 3 customers selection will be random.

Agent Customer relationship table:

Note: While creating above 2 tables, you need to take care of below points:

Agent_ID data type and size should be same in both tables.
“Capacity” column of “agent info” table should be numeric.
Customer_ID data type and size in “agent customer relationship table” should match data type and size of actual customer table.

C .Creating Agent Channel: Agent Channel needs to be created separately via custom offer attribute. Go to Settings->Campaign Settings-> Custom attribute definitions and select Channel attribute:

Provide channel names in “Source list of available values” and then click Add:

Now click on save button. It will be added in the available values box:

D.Creating new Contact Optimize session and defining agent channel and agent tables in it:

In the next blog, i.e. Part -2 we shall look at the next set of steps which include E. Define Agent Capacity rules in Optimize session F. Create Pre-opt flowchart and then run it G. Run Optimize session H. Run Post opt flowchart to deliver offers to optimized contacts. Click Here for Part – 2

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Jyoti Verma

Senior Product Support Engineer

Jyoti Verma is a technical analyst in a support role for over 5+ years in customer problem solving and advocacy. Adept at learning various industrial niches and producing compelling content for clients, she currently helps clients of Marketing Suite at HCL. She plans to present more informative articles on different marketing products in the future that will help clients to implement their marketing strategies efficiently.