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Summary

Our October 11^th 2023 release, v2023.20, introduces Import Completed and Infinite Loop Custom Alerts available in your Dashboard; the ability to see and download Infinite Loop metrics from your Dashboard; the ability to delete drafts of Playbooks, Emails, Segments, SMS, and Landing Pages; an increased Email subject line character limit; an increased 90-day date range for Customer Trail; and the ability to import files directly into your Data Workspace.

For additional information on these updates please read the Dashboard, Playbooks, Content, Audience, and Data Automation sections of this article.

For bug fixes, please read the Bug Fixes section of this article.

Dashboard

Learn more - Dashboard

There are three major updates that have occurred within your Dashboard. The first is a new Custom Alert for completed Imports, the second is a new metric now being surfaced for Infinite Loops, and the third is Custom Alert for Infinite Loops.

The first new Custom Alert is “Imports completed.” This has been added so that you know when something has gone right. Previously, you could have used the “Customer info didn't process during time frame” to get an alert when something has gone wrong. Although very similar functionally, you can now use either or both depending on your preferences. The threshold when configuring an “Imports completed” alert refers to the number of files that the Platform successfully ingested during your specified monitoring period. It uses a Rolling Monitoring Period. You can see an example of this alert in the following screenshot:

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The second update is the metric for “Accounts held in Infinite Loop(s)” in your Assignments and Sending section. Like all metrics, this can be downloaded for more detail on the Customers this is occurring for. An Infinite Loop is when a Customer continuously and repeatedly experiences a Control within a Playbook without interruption. If an Infinite Loop occurs, your Customer may then also receive a message repeatedly. For this reason, our system will pause the Customer treatment at the next Modify Attribute or other control that would cause a re-evaluation. As a whole, this both safeguards your Customer experience and highlights potential logistical issues with your Playbooks. This metric also comes with the ability to download the underlying information, which will allow you to investigate, should this occur. As an example, you can see an Infinite Loop in this image:

The third update to Custom Alerts, is the “Accounts held by infinite loop” Alert. This way instead of having to manually check if this event is occurring, you can get a notification via email or SMS. When creating the threshold for this Alert, the value represents the number of customers that are caught in an Infinite Loop. Like with the “Imports completed” Alert, it uses a Rolling Monitoring Period. Selecting this Alert will give you a very similar screen to Infinite Loops:

Playbooks

Learn more - Playbooks

There are many reasons why organization is important, and for that reason, draft Playbooks can now be deleted by those with the “Playbook Designer” role. If a Playbook has been published in the past, it will not be able to be deleted. You can delete a draft Playbook by clicking the kebab menu to the right as shown in this screenshot:

Content

Learn more - Content

There are two major updates to Content. The first is draft deletion and the second is larger subject lines in your Emails.

As stated in the Playbooks section of this article, draft deletion of SMS, Emails, and Landing Pages has been implemented to allow you to remove clutter, assuming you have the “Content Designer” role. Also like Playbooks, once the Content has been published, it can not be deleted. Notice in this example image that the draft available for deletion does not have a publish date in the right-most column:

The second update in Content is for your Emails and their subject line length. In the past, this was 255 characters. This could be problematic, primarily if you were utilizing DotLiquid as it tends to include a larger number of characters. To combat this it has been increased to 4000 characters which should be sufficient for any DotLiquid needs:

Audience

Learn more - Audience

Your Segments have the same new capability introduced for Playbooks, SMS, Emails, and Landing Pages. You can now delete draft Segments for the sake of keeping your instance of the Platform tidy. It is only available for those with the “Segment Designer” role. In the same way that the other draft deletions work, clicking the kebab menu on the right will give you the option to delete the Segment, which can be seen below:

Additionally, for increased visibility and investigation. Customer Trail now has the ability to see up to 90 days in the past instead of the previous 30:

Data Automation

Learn more - Data Automation

Data Workspace are the Data Warehouses that live as part of the Platform. They can be used in a number of different ways, but the primary way you will use them will likely be in the form of data validation or transformation using SQL queries. The supporting documentation will be released in the near future, as well as a masterclass, so keep an eye out for an invite.

Previously, to load your information into your Data Workspace, you would have had to engineer your own system to upload the information to your Workspace, or you would have had to do it manually. Either of those is time-consuming, but now you have the capability to import into your Data Workspace. You import to Data Workspace the same way you would to update your Customer Accounts. We will now run through a brief example of what it looks like to do this.

First, you would create a new Data Source Mapping of a Data Workspace:

Second, you create your Data Source, which will be the file dropped on Symend’s SFTP server:

Third, you configure your file, which is identical to the “file drop” method for updating Customer Accounts directly:

Next, you will describe the contents of your file via their names, and their data types, similar to how this worked when directly mapping a file to your Customer Attributes:

Upon activation, the Data Mapping from your file to your Data Workspace will automatically create the appropriate tables. At this point, you would likely want to go in and make schemas, tasks, queries, and whatever supporting engineering is required, though technically this is optional. After this has been done, you then create a Data Mapping from your Workspace to your Customer Accounts, we can even see that our MYSOURCE mapping has appeared in the list of available tables:

Bug Fixes