HCL Unica (acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018) is a suite of enterprise marketing management tools including marketing automation with cross-channel campaign management, budgeting and forecasting, project workflow management, asset management, brand management and spend management.
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LeanData
Score 9.7 out of 10
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LeadData is built around account-based nurturing and account-based reporting. The nurturing aspect allows users to segment inbound leads by account details such as owner, active opportunity, customer, and sales stage. This is available with any marketing automation platform synced to Salesforce.com, so users of Eloqua, Marketo, Act-On, Hubspot, and others can use LeadData Demand Management. This product is built on top of the LeanData Lead2Account Matching engine.
I think it is wel suited for a business with a lot of one on one relations in the database. For example a supermarket that sells products to a client and gives a reduction on that product. It is nice if the selection process is not to complex and does not involve to many calculations. It is also nice if it is very clear what you want to follow up. In our environment we have lots of many-to-many relations. for example one product is held by more then one client. And that client might have more of those products with other clients. These kind of situation demands for a lot of calculations with derived fields(*), and there things go far too slow. Unica is probably not such a good solution for us, because our environment is too complex, and so is to process of creating the selection, we often have to change things in the selection flows. Because of the complexity it is difficult to see what the flow is exactly doing afterwoods, it also takes to much time to modify existing campaigns. The interface is not handy to work with, if you have long lists of variables, of tables or derived fields(*) you have to scroll through trough them, you can not really search them or reorder them. You can not drag and drop fields or other objects like derived fields in the flow, what would be easy if you have to make frequent changes to the proces flow. When you copy objects something the content of the object changes because the links with other objects or lost. (*) derived field: field to calculate something
Ability to translate Multiple SQL queries into a very easy to use visual GUI.
Provides the ability to pre-define segments, run them once in off hours, store them in their own system tables for quick youth and a significant reduction in CPU utilization on the database.
It’s use of Reusable objects. Including user variables to pre-define calculations one time, macros that you can create and pass values to parameterize the SQL code And the creation of templates to easily replicate work.
It’s ability to bring in external data on the fly that can very easily be mapped into any flowchart.
It’s flexibility and creating UNIX script via triggers to automate sending of files to multiple vendors with different FTP sites
It’s flexibility in the output layouts that it can create.
Allows us to incorporate almost any filter or type of update (including "has changed" in addition to equals, does not equal, etc.) to direct leads down a path specific to our needs based on Lead Source.
Allows us to manage our territory assignments relatively easily.
Since our decision flow is relatively complex, LeanData Lead2Account Matching Engine can isolate and determine how a specific or a group of leads went through the flow process and where they encountered an error or unexpected behavior. This allows us to fine-tune and make sure everything is working as we expect it should.
Their implementation & support organizations are top-notch! The product is excellent, but it's only realized because of the implementation team's commitment to helping me be successful.
Greater integration of real time (Interact) capabilities with outbound channels, in particular IBM eMessage Email & SMS delivery.
Additional outbound channels to be integrated into eMessage, including Facebook Fanpage & Twitter DM broadcasts. At the moment these are possible only through custom additional integration.
Support for additional marketing database technology, e.g. MySQL, Exasol, ParAccel, WX2.
Provision of database technology with software purchase, as Web technology (IBM WebSphere Express) is supplied for free, but no database is supplied - since IBM also market DB2, which is a supported technology it seems a shame.
Currently we can only troubleshoot the lasted update in the audit. If we can see the historic iterations, that would be really helpful to understand a lead's journey.
Because it is so robust, stepping through some of the logic can get confusing.
There are three main factors to renew a licence: 1) Cost to migrate to another platform would be rather expensive and time consuming, plus the requirement of retraining employees to use a new tool 2) It has been proven time and time again that it is a market leader in the space (10 years +) 3) It can be built upon, with the addition of additional IBM EMM modules - despite theories it does have very strong digital capabilities.
The team is responsive and quick. The training process was patient and thorough. I felt confident using the tool after the two-week implementation period. The initial processing of our existing leads was painfully slow, but the team worked hard to help reduce the friction of that initial implementation process. Post-implementation, the team is helpful and responsive to the question.
- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process
The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.
Compared to SFDC out-of-the-box routing it is far superior. Giving you the ability to quickly make changes on the fly and test in a sandbox environment. The ability to troubleshoot leads and how they are routed is also a plus. Built-in email alerts also reduce the amount of technical debt in SFDC.
Using the lead routing module has cut down the time I spend making changes to the logic by 90%, while also increasing the accuracy of changes by validating them.
I am now able to investigate why a lead routed a certain way in a way I never was previously, helping our business to determine any tweaks to our current set-up.
