Unica summer release is here!

Unica summer release is here! HCL have just released the newest version of the Unica suite 12.1.4 and it has a host of new features and enhancements. I will pick out some of the key ones here to give you a flavour of what you will get when you try out this latest version.

New user interface

Let’s start with the change you will see first. HCL are letting you pick if you want this new user interface which has been overhauled with what they are calling the “Kit-Kat Menu” a more modern, icon driven interface and a left-hand navigation menu.

But for those of you who have been using Unica for years you might feel the old interface is more your cup of tea and that is still there as “Classic UI” so do not worry, you can chose which you want to use.

Listed below are the new enhancements in the suite.

Unica Campaign

• Unica will warn you how many flows used in a given segment when you go to alter it
• There are simpler cleaner ways to look at segments
• Oracle 12c and 19c ODBC support
• Option to run only the “blue process boxes” e.g. to the calculations but do not send/output parts, before this was a manual process if you wanted to be sure to stop the outputs from running

Unica Deliver

• WhatsApp conversational messages/replies has been added. This means you can have Unica respond to WhatsApp replies from your contacts. This is achieved by allowing the WhatsApp replies to flow back into new table in the Unica system tables called UCC_WhatsAppReplyMessage, that you can then build flows to analyse and react
• Quick builder now can work with dynamic/rule content for images, buttons and links in a similar way to message editor
• Responses on SMS can now be linked to which sender short code you used to send them

Unica Plan

• Improved Out of office tools for your marketers allowing them to schedule the Out of office hours

Unica Interact

• Interact has been adding and improving the Personalisation Playback and their second phase of these has been delivered in 12.1.4
• Added the view type of Offers. This provides a view of the sessions and users associated with selected offers. Additionally, you can see the top three offers Interact presents the most at every aggregation unit (hours, days, or months)
• Added the view type of Segments. This provides a view of the sessions and users associated with selected segments Additionally, you can see the top three segments that are eligible the most at every aggregation unit (hours, days, or months).
• Capabilities of selecting any past date range, in addition to several pre-set ranges, for both newly added view types
• In both Offers and Segments view types, you can drill down to individual API request level
• Improved user interface for smoother and convenient user interaction
• A new batch that runs once a day for purging the playback data older than the retention period

Unica Journey

• Read only mode has been added to published Journeys which lets you check the touch points without having to pause it as you did before
• Results of landing pages on email communications used by journey can now be used in decision splits
• DB2 support

In summary, I feel the marketing user will enjoy the more modern user interface being an option now. The new WhatsApp reply message feature is very powerful, not only for conversations held by Unica with your customers as HCL are promoting but also to feed response off to other places and systems in your organisation. For example, imagine you are a package holiday firm and you ask your customer what place they would like to go next, those responses could not only be used to power recommendations in the Unica stack but could be passed on to sales reps to empower their understanding of your customer’s wants. There is good progress on maturing a number of features in Unica and increasing it’s breadth of support of technology stacks. Overall this new version I believe will bring benefits to Unica clients, new and old.

If you want to know more about using the features of the new release, get in touch we would be happy to guide you through it.