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AMBERLEAF’S AFFINIUM ADVANTAGE NEWSLETTER: Volume V
Welcome to Volume V of AmberLeaf’s Affinium Advantage Newsletter. This newsletter provides helpful information about new products in the Unica Affinium Suite and shares relevant lessons learned from our extensive Unica experience.
In the last installment of the newsletter we focused on Unica’s expansion into offering a full marketing software suite and our recent implementation of six Affinium modules in a six week time period. This implementation proved that it is now possible to acquire an integrated, multi-channel architecture in a very short time at an extremely reasonable price.
This volume of the newsletter focuses on Unica’s Affinium Leads product. Affinium Leads is a lead management solution that enables organizations to qualify, prioritize, route, track and measure their sales or relationship management process. Prospects or referrals can be quickly loaded into Affinium Leads through integration with Affinium Campaign, the web enabled user interface or from a third-party data provider. Affinium Leads is a sophisticated, user-friendly tool that will help your organization connect marketing and sales processes and extend your marketing capabilities to communicate with prospects and customers in a more timely, efficient and personalized manner.
The tables below provide descriptions and key points of interest for each of the following main areas of the Affinium Leads solution:
- User Interface (Detail Pages)
- Rules and Tables
- Alerts and Notification
- Affinium Leads Integrator (ALI)
- Reporting
AFFINIUM LEADS
User Interface (Detail Pages)
| What is it? |
The Affinium Leads user interface is simple, yet sophisticated. The primary components of the interface include:
- A customizable homepage that acts as both a dashboard of metrics and a portal into working your leads.
- Customizable data entry screens that are used to capture and show information about Leads, Users, Organizations, Contacts, etc.
- Search capabilities for quick and advanced searching.
- Configuration views for creating business rules and altering the look and feel of the data entry forms.
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| Point(s) of interest |
Affinium Leads does a great job supporting the detail data entry pages. Users with the proper access can easily add new fields to the UI and database as well as to the relevant data entry screens. The customization flow and capabilities are best of breed. |
Rules and Tables
| What is it? |
Rules are configurations that tell Affinium Leads when and how to manage each lead based on specific events such as lead creation, updates, acceptance or lack of activity on a lead that falls outside of your organization’s predefined service level agreements (SLAs).
Tables store the logic that drives the rules. You can view and edit these tables via the user interface, but they don’t actually reside in the database. These tables can be easily created or manipulated by any user with the proper permissions.
Rules and Tables function together to appropriately route, escalate and manage all Leads. Rules generally reference a Table that is used for effective matching, value lookup, routing, filtering, etc.
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| Point(s) of interest |
Affinium Leads comes with easy to use wizards that help users create Rules and Tables. Rules are stored with descriptive, auto-generated definitions based on the selections made within the wizard so there is no need to worry about cryptic naming standards. This proves very helpful as more and more users adopt the application.
The combination of Rules and Tables can be very effective for routing and managing leads as they are easy to set up and use for very sophisticated logic. However, the maintenance of these Tables can become overwhelming if they are not set up appropriately. Since the Tables are not physical database tables, large Tables can be hard to update and maintain as you have limited automation opportunities against them. When correctly planned, the Tables can normally be set up with very few records, increasing manageability and decreasing maintenance.
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Alerts and Notifications
| What is it? |
The Affinium Leads application comes with a customizable homepage that serves as a user’s dashboard highlighting which leads need to be worked and in what order. Additionally, the application can be configured to send email notifications to users based on specific time intervals (daily/weekly summary) or based on triggering events that the system monitors (change in status, lack of activity, etc.). These are very easy to configure.
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| Point(s) of interest |
Most common notification usage is supported by simple configuration settings. However, some companies or departments will request custom content to be added to the emails being sent out. Custom email templates can be added to address any custom content or formatting requests. This is controlled by a series of JSP pages (templates). There are examples to draw from, but this is definitely advanced functionality.
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Affinium Leads Integrator (ALI)
| What is it? |
Unica’s bundled XML based data integration tool enables you to update, import or export data to the Affinium Leads database. ALI can read and write to flat files or external databases in batch or real-time mode. Real time integration supports HTTP and SOAP/XML requests. ALI is very powerful, not too complicated to learn, and will be a part of nearly any Leads implementation.
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| Point(s) of interest |
While the ALI documentation is helpful and there are several samples available for reference, you will need to build a custom script for any data integration event - including loading data from Affinium Campaign. There is no Campaign process box that automatically writes to Affinium Lead tables. Most integration events are very easy to build, but as requirements and complexity increase, so will your mastery of in-depth ALI functionality.
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Reporting
| What is it? |
Similar to Affinium Campaign, Affinium Leads is delivered with a standard set of Cognos reports. You can alter these or create new reports. The standard reports pull from a series of reporting tables in the leads database. Affinium Leads comes with an automated SQL script that aggregates data from the transactional tables and loads it into isolated reporting tables. This is done to prevent contention on the transaction side of Leads when running reports. You can set up this aggregate script to run at any desired frequency.
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| Point(s) of interest |
Adding reports in Leads is not the same as adding them for Campaign. There is nothing that automatically picks up the new reports and adds them to the Leads report page. You will need to create the new report and then edit the reports.jsp and the reports.properties files in order for it to appear for the user.
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For more information about the Affinium Leads application or any of AmberLeaf’s services, please contact Tim Perry at 312.593.8404 or tperry@amberleaf.net.
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