Getting Started: What is a Playbook
- Parker Hutcheson (Deactivated)
A playbook is a coordinated strategy that brings together a collection of Campaigns. The Playbook Designer will allow you to design strategies for all business use cases.
It is the core of your engagement and retention strategies, you will find various channel options, tools to segment your audience, and tools to experiment and iterate on your overall strategic playbooks.
You can define a playbook from scratch yourself by building it following a customer path through channel and flow controls. Symend also offers a Playbook Library, designed by Symend Behavioral Scientists and our Product team, each one is optimized for an industry or business vertical.
Table of Contents
How are Playbooks used?
You can build your playbook by using the channel and flow controls to create an engagement strategy. Once you are comfortable with the channels and flow you can choose to ‘validate’ your playbook. Symend’s application will check if you’ve set up your playbook correctly. If you have missed an important configuration the system will notify and point you to where you need to go an adjust.
Once you have validated that everything is set up then you are ready to publish your playbook.
The use case for a playbook involves many options:
You can have multiple playbooks within your organization’s instance. The use case for a playbook is represented by Symend's various product offering (for example, Symend Cure or Symend Grow).
A Customer can exist in multiple playbooks at once but cannot move between playbooks.
Entry to a Playbook is defined by a segment.
A playbook will utilize a Draft -> Published (Active, Editing) -> Paused -> De-activated publishing workflow.
Workflow | Description |
|---|---|
Draft | When a new playbook is created, it's created in a "Draft" format:
|
Published | When a draft playbook is published, the playbook will be promoted to published. A published playbook is ready to be associated with audience segments (customers). |
Published - Active | A published playbook will accept and run audience segments (customers) through the controls and it can then be considered "Active". |
Published - Editing | A published playbook can be edited and any edits to a playbook will result in a new version of the playbook, managed by Symend. All customers in that playbook will observe the latest version of the playbook when the playbook is re-published. |
Paused | When a playbook is paused customers will continue to flow through the playbook, updates to the customers will be processed, but no new customers will be accepted into the playbook. |
De-activated | When a playbook is de-activated customers will no flow through the playbook, and no new customers will be accepted to the playbook |
Each playbook will have a required fallback campaign to execute on the “remainder” of the segment category ruleset
This is a guard-rail against customers having no campaign assigned to them, due to segmentation errors or lack of required data to assign customer.
The fallback campaign can contain no outreaches. Our platform requires that all customers that enter a playbook are assigned to campaign.
You can read more about the Fall-Back Campaign.
A customer can be exited from the playbook they are in through two methods:
The exit control.
The early exit configuration.
You can read more about the Exit Control.
What is a Campaign?
A campaign is a plan that orchestrates the order, timing, and type of messages used to engage with an Audience Segment to encourage an action. It is a combination of flow controls that describe the journey a customer may take through the playbook.
How are Campaigns used?
A Campaign can be used for “Treatment” within the Symend Cure product and “Engagement” and/or “Audience Growth” in the Symend Grow product. Additional use cases for Campaigns will be enabled in the future through our Playbook Library.
The use case for a campaign involves many options:
Each playbook can have one or multiple campaigns.
Within a single playbook, a customer can exist in only a single campaign at one time, but can move between campaigns during their journey through the playbook.
Entry to a Campaign is defined by a segment.
To avoid a customer being assigned to multiple campaigns or not being assigned to a campaign at all, customer assignment will be performed in an order defined by the playbook designer, and customers that do not meet the conditions of any will be assigned to the “fallback” campaign that is specified by the playbook designer.
A Campaign will contain the collection of controls outlined under the Path Controls and Activities section.
Navigating Flow Controls
Customers will be assessed for entry at the playbook control, if they meet the entry segment condition they will be placed in the playbook
Once in a playbook, customers will run through the campaign entry condition run order, once assigned to a campaign they can be considered active on that campaign and are no longer eligible for following campaigns in that run order.
Once in a campaign, customers will be evaluated at each flow control until they reach a control that is:
Scheduled for today or a day in the future.
A wait control that required the customer is held until update.
A modify or split control that requires evaluation.
A channel control that is set for a day in the future.
When a customer is re-evaluated, they will go to the beginning of the run order campaign entry until they reach a control that can be executed or will be executed in the future.