Our October 24^th 2023 release, v2023.21, introduces two new Custom Alerts in your Dashboard. One for Customers entering your Fallback Campaigns, and one for newly created Customers who have not entered any Campaign. Within Playbooks, you now have the ability to select any destination for Send Text Controls based on a Customer Attribute of the string data type. Also within Playbooks, you can also utilize the new Extensible Channel Control, which will allow you to send through any channel you configure. Your Customer Trail has been upgraded to show the message name and description for email or SMS Events. Lastly, your Customer Trail will now also display the destination phone number for any SMS Events.

For additional information on these updates please read the Dashboard, Send Text Control, Extensible Channel Control, and Customer Trail sections of this article.

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

Dashboard

To increase your monitoring capability, two new Custom Alerts have been added. One for Customers who have entered a Fallback Campaign, and one for new Customers who have not entered a Campaign or Playbook.

The first alert, “Customer(s) assigned to Fallback Campaign”, was created for the situation in which your Fallback Campaign is not supposed to occur. Assume that all non-Fallback Campaigns are intended to include all possible scenarios for your Customers. Then if a Customer makes it to your Fallback Campaign, you know something is wrong. For this situation, you likely want to be alerted. The threshold for this alert represents the number of Customers assigned to your Fallback Campaign. It uses a Rolling Monitoring Period.

You can see the options for creation in the following image:

The second alert, “Customers are not assigned to a playbook/campaign”, was created because if a new Customer is never assigned a Playbook or Campaign, then there will be no interaction with them. The assumption is that if you are importing Customers, you want to interact with them, and this alert facilitates that. The threshold represents the number of Customers not assigned to a Playbook or Campaign. It uses a Static Monitoring Period.

You can see an example of what the creation looks like in this screenshot:

Dashboard	Description

Dashboard	Description
What’s New	“Customer(s) assigned to Fallback Campaign” Alert Rolling Monitoring Period Theshold is the number of Customers assigned “Customers are not assigned to a playbook/campaign” Alert Static Monitoring Period Theshold is the number of Customers assigned
What’s Changed	Downloading Customers caught in infinite loops will now be sorted in descending order by date and time
What’s Removed	N/A

Send Text Control

In the past, all SMS messages would be sent to the value in your Customer’s Phone Attribute. If they happened to have another phone number, you would have had to create a solution that would overwrite the Phone Attribute. Now, the Send Text Control can be configured to send to any Customer Attribute of the string data type, allowing you to send to secondary phone numbers.

You can see the ability to select another Customer Attribute in this image:

Playbooks	Description

Playbooks	Description
What’s New	Send Text Controls can now use any string attribute as the destination for the text message All Send Text Controls will need to have a destination defined before publishing All existing Send Text Controls have been assigned the default value of `Phone` New Send Text Controls will default to utilize the `Phone` attribute
What’s Changed	N/A
What’s Removed	N/A

Extensible Channel Control

Also referred to as “Bring Your Own Channel”, the Extensible Channel Control allows our Platform to integrate with other messaging service providers and channels. This feature extends the capabilities of the Platform to be truly omnichannel. Once configured, the Extensible Channel Control will allow you to integrate with any service that you may want to utilize.

As an overview, the workflow looks like the following:

In order to set up your channel, you will need to first make a call to the Symend API to create a Sender. It will use this Sender to determine where to POST the API call which will be covered below.

After this is done, you will see it available as a channel in your Extensible Channel Control, pictured below:

However, you must also create a proxy to handle the call from the Symend Platform that will look like the following:

HEADERS
X-SYM-ORGANIZATIONID: string
Authorization: Bearer {M2M Token}
Content-Type: application/json

//PAYLOAD
{
    "messageId": string (uuid),
    "toAddress": string, // (For example, may be an email or phone number)
    "content": string, // Personalized content generated from the SMS template
    "additionalDetails": [ key:value ] // list of key value pairs
}

The proxy will then transform channel information to the structure your 3rd party messaging service expects. The proxy will call your 3rd party messaging service, which will then deliver through your desired channel. Documentation and education sessions will be available in the near future, as will the capability to pass message events back into the Platform from your 3rd party service.

Playbooks	Description

Playbooks	Description
What’s New	Extensible Channel Controls, which can send to any third party messaging service Must be configured via the following: You call the Symend API to allow you to select your channel in the Platform You create a proxy which is made to handle calls from the Platform, make necessary transformations, and relay the message to your 3rd party service
What’s Changed	N/A
What’s Removed	N/A

Customer Trail

Previously, viewing the SMS or Email Events would display their Message ID. In order to increase the convenience of Event views, this has been modified to display the message name and description instead.

You can see them present in the following image:

With the addition of the ability to select a destination for your Text Message Controls, greater clarity for easy debugging is also necessary. Therefore, the Sent to field will now be populated with the destination in all of your SMS Events:

Customer Trail	Description

Customer Trail	Description
What’s New	`Sent to` will populate for all SMS events with the destination
What’s Changed	All email and SMS events will have the `Message name` and `Message description` instead of the `Message ID`
What’s Removed	N/A

Bug Fixes

Platform Area	Description

Platform Area	Description
Data Source Mappings	Spaces could be added before or after field names when defining a data source, they are now stripped during creation

Symend Knowledge Base

v2023.21 Release Notes

Dashboard

Send Text Control

Extensible Channel Control

Customer Trail

Bug Fixes