Associating Products and Interaction Contacts

[bmursell]

Dear Experts,

Not sure if it's a common use case, but our business has the requirement to generate relationships between interaction contacts and products. For example, if a customer registers a product we would like to use that information for profiling, re-targeting and general analytical purposes. I have been trying to utilise the Products - Use and Resonance app, and although this appears to be a good store of product data, it's not clear how you would associate ownership against an interaction contact.

If anyone has similar use cases and could advise upon how best to associate the two then I would be most grateful in knowing.

Thanks

Bradley Mursell

[SCHNEIDERT · Accepted solution]

Hi bradnmursell,

for me it sound more like you would like to have something like an "installed base" like in C4C, right?

With interaction SALES_ORDER for example you know which product a customer bought sometime but you don't know if he still has this product in use right now.

I think there could be a better way (e.g. with CBO), but I can tell you how I've done it and how it works for us:

We have an external system where the customers (e.g. with their C4C- or ERP-ID) and the corresponding products use are stored in a table with many columns and would like to have that information in SAP Marketing Cloud for segmentation.

1. Create an interaction_type, e.g. Z_PRODUCT_IN_USE

2. Create Custom Field for Interaction, e.g. a text field YY1_PRODUCTINUSE

--> in that field we write the information about the product separated by comma. E.g. BaseProductName, ProductVariant, Version/Year

3. Extract the data from the external system (fetch the data of the different columns and transform it into one field, separated by comma, like we need it in SMC).

4. Import Actual Data

a) Plan a recurring application job which deletes interactions of the Interaction Type Z_PRODUCT_IN_USE --> e.g. every night 3:00 am

b) Use the OData-Service API_MKT_INTERACTION_SRV to import the data --> e.g. every morning 5:00 am

--> So you have the actual data every day (if a customer doesn't use a product anymore and it gets deleted in the external system it won't be transported to SMC anymore)

6. Make the fields visible in Segmentation as you usually do with other custom fields

7. The Marketing Team is able to segment for example all customers with product XY in version 2017 in use.

Very simple approach, but it works for us

Maybe that helps.

BR Tobias

[bmursell · Accepted solution]

Hi Tobias,

Thank you. This is very helpful.

Regards

Bradley

[SCHNEIDERT · Accepted solution]

Hi Bradley,

glad to hear. Let me know if there are any further questions concerning that scenario.

BR Tobias

[maik_bosch]

Hi Bradley,

maybe this one helps you to understand the whole concept better:

https://enable.cx.sap.com/playlist/dedicated/89743631/1_s1b8faws/1_0a5slpzb

From my point of view interaction products (e.g. as line items in sales orders) should help you here.

BR

Maik