To seamlessly transition the channels presenting offers from SAS RTDM to SAS ID, Munvo worked with our client to develop creative omnichannel activation solutions that addressed their needs:

1. Rotating Chefs in the Kitchen:
To manage the sheer volume of campaigns to be migrated, the campaigns were grouped by 10 unique “zones” that offers were shown to customers on the email, multiple portions of the online customer portal, mobile apps, and push notification channels. Each of these channel technical teams and the business units leveraging those channels had their internal roadmaps and timeframes where migrating campaigns would not work, so zone launch releases for when they could do so (in the “Kitchen”) was a significant planning exercise for all. This enabled major flexibility for these technical and business teams alongside our key stakeholders and their teams, ultimately resulting in greater collaboration and reduced risk of issues.

2. “Taste Testing” Each Permutation using a Split Testing Framework:
There could be multiple reasons why a customer may not see the expected offer, but broadly speaking they could be caused by the business logic in the campaign being incorrect, or the offer not rendering correctly to customers on their device.

“Taste testing” each permutation and then finding root causes when counts or renderings didn’t show up as expected therefore became challenging, especially since the skillset required to investigate each flavour of issue was different. To manage the sheer volume of campaigns, offers, and channel zones, Munvo separated testing into two distinct streams:

• Unit Testing (The Logic):
  Munvo utilized SAS ID’s built-in scenario testing and HTML simulation tools to feed the decisioning engine specific customer profiles and verified that the core decisioning mathematics were as expected. A 99%+ acceptance criteria of both counts and individual customer records ensured that what was previously developed in SAS RTDM was replicable in SAS ID and provided reassurance to our client’s business units leveraging these tools for marketing.
• Business Acceptance Testing (The Experience):
  Our client’s business BAT teams focused entirely on how the offer rendered in the wild (e.g., website widgets, mobile deep-links, emails, etc.). Through having detailed checklists and automated tasks, this testing effort was reduced substantially, all while keeping output quality high. As the project progressed, later zones had a 0% defect rate across dozens of campaigns, thus being a testament to the approach taken.

  By strictly separating logic testing from visual rendering, Munvo protected the client’s BAT teams from technical noise, and technical teams from chasing and replicating adhoc issues, resulting in high confidence in the final results.

3. “Baking” and “Plating” Separately:
Many projects would have a new application’s infrastructure/integration setup and marketing campaigns go-live at the same time to minimize downtime. However, due to the sheer complexity of the real-time decisioning implementation for our client, this would lead to a high likelihood of enormous effort spent investigating issues, such as customers not seeing the expected offer.

To address this, zone launch releases were separated into technical releases (where the infrastructure was “baking”) and campaign releases (where marketing campaign “plating” or being ready for customers to see occured). This ensured rapid issue resolution post go-live and subsequently reduced the risk of rolling back releases.