Transact Insights 18.05

Overview

Transact Insights 18.05.0 is a major release of Insights introducing a powerful new analytics visualization called User Journeys which provides insights into how users are progressing through key milestones in their on-boarding journey, what paths users take and how it impacts on-boarding experience and conversion. It further adds the capability to segment data and understand how various user segments experience the on-boarding process allowing you to focus on specific problematic journeys.

This release also includes a major architectural enhancement in Insights integration with Maestro by the introduction of a new module called Event Consumer Client Library (ECCL). 18.05.0 adds many other architectural changes that enhance security in data collection, improve scalability and performance of data ingestion, and improve quality of data collected in Insights.

Key Features

User Journeys

The User Journeys feature offers key Insights about your customer journeys in the on-boarding process. It allows you to study customer Journey paths, identify bottlenecks in the Transact Application and the workflow around it, and optimize the on-boarding process by using metrics such as:

• % of users reaching a milestone.
• Time to reach a milestone.
• Completion rates for different journeys.

User journeys are made up of custom Milestone events. You can send application/business specific events that represent key milestones in the on-boarding journey either from a Transact Application or from a Fluent/Groovy service on TM. More on how to send custom Milestones are documented here:

• Sending Milestones from a Maestro Application.
• Sending Milestones from a Composer Application.
• Sending Milestones from Transact Manager.

Segmentation

In the User Journeys view, you can add any number of Segmentation charts on any Milestone presented in the User Journeys graph. Adding a Segmentation chart on a Milestone simply means, you are Segmenting transactions that have reached the corresponding Milestone by a specific Segmentation Category (eg: Age, Gender). Segmenting by Age on the Started milestone may present a different segmentation chart compared to Segmenting by Age on the LinkedIn prefill milestone. This allows great flexibility in the Analytics reports you want to generate and also gives great insights at various levels with a click of a button.

You can send Segmentation events from a Transact Application or from a Fluent/Groovy service on TM. Additionally, you can also send Segmentation data via URL parameter of the Transact Application.

ECCL - A new Client-side Insights integration strategy

Only Available with Transact Maestro 18.05 and Transact Manager 18.05. Also note that, Insights support for Transact Maestro 18.05 Applications is only available with Transact Manager 18.05.

Prior to 18.05, the business logic of Insights that generates Insights events was implemented in the Maestro code base. This presented multiple challenges in terms of; the dependency on the Maestro release cycle, and the customer's schedule to upgrade the Transact Application, test and republish. It would take months to deliver a fix to the customer. With ECCL, most of Insights business logic has been migrated to an intermediary module which gets injected by a script via Transact Manager when a Transact Application is rendered on the browser. That means, if we fix something or introduce a new capability in data collection today and deploy it on the ECCL hosted server, all subsequent Application renders will automatically get the latest code without having to republish the Transact Application. This saves enormous amounts of time, effort and money for our customers. Most importantly, our customers get the latest Insights client capabilities very quickly.

The following figure explains the old and the new implementation.

ECCL support for Composer is yet to be planned in future releases.

Enhancements

Improved Data Security

Only Available with Transact Manager 18.05.

Collecting events from Insights enabled forms requires Transact Manager to perform a number of initialization steps prior to the Application being rendered. This entailed a trade off between Application render speed and event collection reliability & latency. Prior to 18.05, in favor of Application render speed, Insights took the approach of deferring the initialization from Transact Manager by creating an object called a FormRequest in the Insights back-end that contained the required information to authorize Insights events and map them to a data-set that belonged to the corresponding Transact Manager instance. As this approach did not block the Application rendering, there was no impact on performance. However, this approach leads to a race between the time FormRequest is available to Insights and the time Session and Analytics events comes in. Although we mitigated the race by retrying FormRequest tasks from Transact Manager, in some circumstances, it was possible for events to be dropped if their deferred initialization from TM failed repeatedly.

To address this, a new approach has been implemented that satisfies both constraints; Application render time is minimized, and it is no longer possible for legitimate & authorized events to be dropped. All information from the FormRequest is now included in the authentication token (JWT format) injected into Insights-enabled Applications. This eliminates the need for Transact Manager to communicate with the Insights back-end to populate this information. The information in the JWT is non-sensitive, and cryptographically signed, ensuring that it cannot be altered by the user; the Insights back-end will only accept tokens with a valid signature from Transact Manager.

The following figure explains the old and the new implementation.

Improved Insights Data Quality

Only Available with Transact Manager 18.05.

There are two changes which will improve the quality of the data collected in Insights:

1. ECCL implementation adopts the latest browser technologies such as sendBeacon provided by most modern browsers. This capability allows the browser to send queued events even after the browser is closed abruptly. A key scenario where we believe this will help is for Bounced transactions for which the user closes the browser too quickly. Presently, multiple customers have seen a huge number of bounced transacts categorized with an Unknown browser. That is because Insights has not received a Session event from the browser. With ECCL, even if the user closes the browser too quickly, the Insights back-end will still get the session event. Additionally, ECCL implements Priority event queues. Both a critical queue, for events that need to be sent immediately, for example: Transact status events or Section level events, and a batch processed queue, which will hold lower priority events which are periodically processed at 5 second intervals. This strategy will also contribute to improved data quality.
2. The new authorization strategy for Insights event collection makes the authorization stateless and hence removes all inter-event dependencies that existed prior to 18.05. Previously, if for some reason, there was a delay in receiving a form_request from TM, and we started receiving Analytics events from the browser, we would retry for 5 times with a gap of 15 mins and if the form_request was still unavailable at the 5th attempt, we would drop all the events for that transaction. A similar dependency existed between Session event and Analytics event from the browser itself. With the new stateless authorization model, we were able to remove all dependency checks in the data processing pipeline. This new data processing pipeline is also highly scalable with improved performance compared to its predecessor. This also allows Avoka to keep the costs of Insights operations lower.

Release Details