Integration Overview

The SessionM Platform sits at the heart of the customer's experience, interacting with all of the connections it maintains to an ecosystem of merchants: From point of sale to the data analytics gleaned from data warehousing; for app vendors, third parties, messaging channels, and internal Mastercard tooling, SessionM sits in a central location where it can aggregate and orchestrate interactions within the customer's environment. Some of these interactions are exchanges of loyalty and activity data with all parts of the customer landscape, while others allow customers to action on specific customer activities, using timely data provided by the platform.

The diagram below depicts the primary kinds integrations that can access to the SessionM Platform. Most of the integrations build connections with the platform that can be managed using realtime API calls, or endpoints (shown in red and purple). Others rely on batch files to manage data stored in CSV and JSON files (shown in green and purple). In several integrations, both APIs and batch files are available for data processing (shown in purple).

Consider this diagram depicting the SessionM integration architecture:

Once integrated, data can flow in an inbound or outbound directions, while some integrations are build for a combination of both. As noted above, this exchange of data can be managed with either realtime API calls or batch file processing. API-driven calls are a powerful way to enable a transfer of data with updates occurring at a frequent cadence. This dynamic flow can capture changes immediately and ensure that the data feeds from different sources are fresh and accurate.

But, if the data is more static and not in need of constant updates, it may be better to upload data in batch at a less frequent cadence. For this kind of a flow, intermittent updates are adequate, especially when the payloads are not populated with custom data. Of course, every integration is different. So the right approach - including a mix of both the API-driven and the batch - is essential.

SessionM architecture provides a set of integration pathways for several different kinds of systems, including:

• Customer data and transaction systems

• Third parties

• Marketing channels

• Client data

• Mastercard data

• SessionM products, such as Co-brand Optimizer

Customer Data and Transaction Systems

This part of the of integration architecture features the primary sources characterizing the customer ecosystem as it pertains to systems managing customer data and transactions. They include five sources:

• Ecommerce - Customer online purchases occurring as part of shopping experiences in a mobile, social, or web context.

• Identity Provider (IdP) - Customer identities confirmed and authenticated.

• Web/App - Customer actions occurring in web or application experiences; generally without purchases and focused on personalization. For example, accessing customer profiles, wallets, campaigns, loyalty tiers, and any corresponding incentives.

• Point of Sale (POS) - Customer purchasing journeys, whether purchasing items online or at a retail checkout counter.

• Customer Data Platform (CDP) - Customer identities and actions tracked during their interactions with any web sites or applications.

Note that the first three components sit in the customer's web site or mobile app. However, that's not the case for a CDP or POS system. These sit apart but remain available when integrating customer data and transaction systems. For more information, see the integration paths that support customer data and transaction systems.

Third Parties

Third-party integrations focus primarily on providing customer access to products as well as facilitating communication to external systems via very flexible webhooks and daily data exports. One common flow is webhook data out and events (or tags) in. This kind of flow can support integrations with gameification, survey or other experience-based platforms.

Most third-party integrations integrate with events which arise from non-transactional activities. These activities provide triggers that occur from customers engaging in games, refer-a-friend programs, surveys, and the product review writing.

Platform messaging is a powerful way of orchestrating how data is communicated to any third-party, external system and can provide analytics or activation within the merchant's ecosystem. SessionM integrations with third parties ensure that marketers have the ability to create templated and repeatable integrations for one seamless loyalty consumer experience.

Marketing Channels

Marketing channels are generally characterized by outbound webhooks requesting data from SessionM APIs that get user offers, tier statuses, or customer profiles. In this context, SessionM provides data upon request and doesn't work to integrate events.

When planning this integration, it's important to look at what platforms the clients are using. For example, SessionM has a product partnership with Braze that supports several use cases with segmentation logic that allows for the targeting specific sets of customer with specific offers and campaigns. In addition, the integration ensures that detailed and current notifications can be sent to customers, apprising them of their progress on promotional or loyalty activities.

Client Data

Client data integrations work with external data warehouses. The data is not coming from a POS application. The direction for client data flows out from SessionM to client data integrations. The integration is based largely on using SM Sync to ingest nightly data dumps and then data exports that produce CSV or JSON files that client data tools can import.

Mastercard Data

Mastercard data integrations tend to be black boxes, and, generally, the interactions between SessionM and internal Mastercard systems are not shared with the client. Mostly, the work revolves around determining whether or not SessionM has met the standards for legality and compliance. Bottom line: Does SessionM have perission to send data to other Mastercard tools such as personalization and analytical tools?

Co-brand Optimizer

Co-brand Optimizer is a new SessionM feature that offers customers access to the transactional data for their co-brand credit — all within the SessionM Platform. This enables brands to run loyalty programs together with co-brand programs from SessionM. Co-brand Optimizer unlocks greater loyalty member insights, due to the powerful combination of standard POS data with co-brand transactional data that occurs at the brand and outside the brand.

Once this co-brand data resides in SessionM, merchants receive an ongoing feed of their customers' transactions that can be used to drive more enhanced and relevant loyalty program and co-brand engagement. This could include audience creation, ad hoc campaigns, evergreen card value propositions, and performance reporting.

Integration relies on SessionM ingesting data that requires consent for data sharing from both the co-brand merchant and the issuing bank.

SessionM Data Available to Integration Paths

SessionM enables marketers to build engaging loyalty programs by offering end-to-end services that range from strategy and design to implementation and optimization. Integrations with SessionM provide access to data that falls into six product lines:

• Loyalty
  This part of the platform manages a merchant's evergreen loyalty rules, tiers, and points for the loyalty program. It allows merchants to create and manage the program rules for their loyalty members and what they are eligible for in terms of benefits and reward earning. The Loyalty product line contains products that manage rules, loyalty programs, and points. For more information, see the Loyalty Learn Site.

• Engagement
  This part of the platform allows marketers to create engaging promotions - or campaigns - targeted to specific segments of customers, or audiences. These promotions can reward customer behaviors and drive engagement across channels, often making considerable use of messaging to make connections with customers. The Engagement product line contains products that manage campaigns, audiences, and messaging. For more information, see the Engagement Learn Site.

• Offers
  This part of the platform enables marketers to create rewards and discounts that can be earned by or gifted to loyalty customers. The platform allows for flexibility in setting up, creating and distributing the rewards/discounts, including making them available in reward stores. Additionally, customers can own their own loyalty rewards by purchasing them with their banked loyalty points. The Offers product line contains products that manage offers and reward stores. For more information, see the Offers (Incentives) Learn Site.
  

• Customer Services
  This part of the platform provides a collection of features to create, view, and manage loyalty members. It provides a view into who the customers are and what they have done. In addition, the platform provides the ability to build service level actions that customer can complete. The Customer Services product line contains products that manage customer profiles, events, transactions, and activity timelines. For more information, see the explainer documents on customer profiles, custom events, and transactions.

• Data
  This part of the platform provides a robust set of data storage and analytical tools to better understand the loyalty program for each merchant. The Data product line contains products that manage the Data Cloud, the Insights reporting function, and analytics models. For more information, see the feature document on Insights.

• Platform Services
  This part of the platform provides a set of management tools to configure and manage the operations of the loyalty program configuration. It allows dministrators to configure platform segregation and data ingestion critical to the successful customer experience. The Platform Services product line contains products that manage catalogs, accounts/permissions, multi-org hierarchies, SM Sync, and the POS cloud. For more information, see the Data Administration guides or the About Organization Management explainer.