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September '16 Horizon release overview

New Features

Social Community

We are pleased to announce the release of our Social Community feature for loyalty. We’ve spoken to a number of businesses about how they currently use social media as part of their loyalty strategy and the common response was that they’d like to do more.

With Social community we’ve gone a lot further than most solutions and give you the ability to:

  • Reward your members by signing up with or linking their different social accounts; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & Pinterest.
  • Identify who your social influencers are by giving them the ability to share content from your loyalty portal to their social networks and tracking how their followers & friends interact with those posts.
  • Offer your members more relevant and personalised offers by tapping into their rich social profile data and award them if they decide to share this information with you.
  • Grow your member numbers and award your leading referrers by tracking if new members signed up as a result of engaging with another member’s social posts.
  • Gamify your loyalty program with ‘social leaderboards’; let your members see what other members that they’re friends with are up to; how many points they earned and what rewards and offers they’ve been redeeming.
  • Identify key social insights through the Horizon social report including most popular social networks, biggest influencers and social sharers as well as what Facebook categories & groups are the most common between your member base. All this insight will help inform and improve your social media marketing strategy and how it supports your loyalty scheme.

Social Community is a chargeable feature and only available to loyalty customers. The price is based on the number of contacts who sign up with their social accounts and is charged at £1 per 1000 contacts per month. If you are interested in this, please get in touch

Improvements

The following improvements have been delivered in this release:

  • We’ve made it easier to search for loyalty members within Horizon by making it possible to search using loyalty membership number
  • It is now possible to export the loyalty & reward data for each of your members; this includes Loyalty Membership No., Date Joined, Last Login Date, Scheme Withdrawal Date, Points Balance, Transaction Activity, Order Insight fields, Opt-ins
  • As your loyalty members carry out more and more actions, their loyalty transaction activity can grow quite quickly. We’ve added some simple pagination into Horizon so you can navigate through this activity without having to do a lot of scrolling.
  • We’ve made improvements to how we process and handle transaction files (whether that be from POS or ecommerce). These changes make the whole process more robust and ensure our transaction-related reporting is consistent.
  • We’ve made it even easier for your customers to become loyalty members by delivering a single sign on solution (SSO) through SAML. With SSO, customers won’t have to create yet another account and password; they’ll sign in once, through an existing account they have and the creation & management of their loyalty account will be seamless.

Fixes

We’ve fixed the following bugs raised by customers:

  • We’ve fixed an issue whereby search filters seemed to be ignored when attempting to export contacts that matched specific rules.
  • We have addressed an issue where some contacts were still sent messages even though they’d raised spam complaints.
  • When using exclude groups within combined groups, the rules weren’t always being obeyed; we’ve fixed this so it’s no longer an issue.
  • We’ve resolved an issue with publications not auto-populating contact data when CANDDi web tracking is being used.
  • We’ve resolved a bug where rule groups were not providing the right results when using the ‘Member of group is not...’ criteria.

Operations

The following operational updates have been delivered in this release:

  • At HTK the security of our platform and data is paramount to everything we do; we’re always looking at ways to stay ahead and maintain the high standards we adhere to; this includes ensuring we’re using the latest and most performant versions of software. As a result of this on-going exercise we’ve migrated JBoss to Tomcat and also migrated to Java 8. If you’re interested in finding out more about HTK and our security policies please get in touch.