In February, we shared with you our vision for bringing strategic enhancements to The Acoustic Marketing Platform.

Acoustic will help you drive better business and marketing results through major investments in these areas (user-centric design, open ecosystem, performance, scalability, embedded AI) and through new product and services enhancements including AI-powered anomaly detection in automation programs, distributed marketing for franchises, business impact analytics for identifying user experience improvement ROI, and premium support.

As part of this effort, Acoustic Campaign will undergo meaningful enhancements, some of which may require action by you.

Key milestones

Acoustic ID

On March 25, we announced Acoustic ID, a new login method for accessing Acoustic products and services. Over time, Acoustic ID will provide a unified login experience across all Acoustic products and supporting websites, granting you a single profile to access all of the products and services that you know and love.

As of April 1, Acoustic ID is required in order to access Acoustic Support at support.goacoustic.com.

To access Acoustic Campaign, users will continue to log in with IBMid or their existing username / password credentials until Campaign enables Acoustic ID support in late September 2020.

On September 25, Acoustic ID will be enabled for Acoustic Campaign. Learn more about how to get ready for Acoustic ID.

Infrastructure upgrades

We are delivering enhancements to bring you greater scalability and flexibility, support data residency requirements, and provide speed and improved reliability. As part of that effort, we will be performing infrastructure upgrades for Acoustic Campaign customers beginning in early May and completing in early June.

Customers hosted on Pods 6, 8, 9, and A will experience short downtime windows during planned maintenance periods. Additional details about what to expect during maintenance periods can be found here. 

An additional communication will be sent with the exact schedule for your organization.

As we referenced in our February 26 notice to you, we will also update our IP addresses as part of these infrastructure upgrades. If your company currently whitelists IP addresses in order to use Campaign, connect on-premises endpoints (e.g. Unica Campaign), or connect a custom endpoint, then this may impact your Acoustic Campaign functionality. To avoid service interruption, please take the following action items before these infrastructure upgrades occur:

• Reach out to your IT organization immediately and determine if your company has whitelisting in place.
• If "yes," then note that Acoustic will require hostname whitelisting instead of IP whitelisting following these infrastructure upgrades. Please whitelist the relevant URL hostnames listed here or contact our support team at https://support.goacoustic.com for assistance.
• If "no," then no further action is required since companies without whitelisting in place will not be affected by this change.

In very specific circumstances, additional action may also be required for Google push notification customers. Please see here for additional details.

In addition, additional action is required for customers using custom email domains. Please see the instructions here.

*If your contract is retained by IBM, please refer to the IBM product datasheet containing similar information. 

FTP / HTTP end of life

In order to provide greater platform security for all customers, Acoustic Campaign will no longer support non-secure FTP after May 15, 2020. Secure FTPS connectivity will be required after that date.

U.S. Campaign users and automated processes connecting via non-secure FTP must begin connecting via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) by May 15, 2020. Instructions on how to use SFTP can be found here.

In addition, non-SSL HTTP connectivity for user interfaces and API connections will no longer be supported after December 31, 2020.

URL changes

Acoustic is providing a streamlined user experience across products, including updated branding, improved navigation, and modern design. These enhancements include updates to how users access and integrate with Acoustic products.

What is happening?

Beginning in April 2020, Acoustic will transfer URLs for all Acoustic products to Acoustic-branded domains. These changes primarily affect IBM-branded domains, such as customer-engagement.ibm.com and ibmmarketingcloud.com. This transfer includes domains for user interfaces, as well as domains for web tracking or conversion tracking codes, API integrations, SFTP connections, and software SDKs.

What do I need to do?

The majority of users do not need to take action at this time. Certain groups will need to perform specific updates to how they integrate with Acoustic products.

Customers and partners who have implemented Acoustic APIs, automation via (S)FTP, or who have embedded Acoustic product SDKs within their applications will need to take action to update URLs.

In addition, customers and partners who have downloaded a local copy of Campaign XML API Test Harness will also need to take action. Please refer to these detailed instructions and accompanying dates.

For Unica Campaign customers, integrations using either the native integration (process boxes within Unica) or the accelerator scripts will need to update URLs. HCL has provided a tech note explaining how to find the affected URLs and how to update them. In addition, if the UBX Toolkit is in use, go to the file Toolkit-Home/conf/config.properties and change the property ubx.api.service.url to the new Acoustic URL as referenced here under the Exchange heading.

Support, help center, and other resources

As of April 1, 2020, Acoustic has transitioned to a new Support portal. Additionally:

• Customers will no longer be able to raise cases via the existing IBM Support portals. 
• The phone numbers for contacting Customer Support have changed and you are no longer be able to use the existing numbers for raising cases. To contact support, call:

  • United States: +1 866-820-5136

  • United Kingdom: +44 808 169 2385

  • Additional regional numbers to follow
• If you need assistance accessing the new support portal, please see our help center for assistance. 
  

Continuing beyond April 1, you will still use all existing usernames and passwords to access Acoustic products as you do today, though look out for future updates as additional Acoustic products enable Acoustic ID.

• Chat will be available as a support channel across the majority of Acoustic products.
• We have changed our Severity Levels; moving to 3 levels of severity based upon the impact on your business.
• We have changed how we measure your Support experience to Net Promoter Score, you will receive a survey for both Cases and Chats and we encourage you to complete and provide feedback on your experience with Acoustic Support.

Customer feedback and ideas

We're listening! We value your feedback and are constantly working to improve our products so that you can do your job easily and effectively. We're excited to announce the new Acoustic Ideas portal at ideas.goacoustic.com. You can sign up to suggest new ideas, or vote and comment on existing ideas, by self-registering on the portal. Look for Acoustic ID to be enabled in the coming weeks! 

If you used our previous Ideas portal, all ideas and votes have been transitioned. You may need to re-subscribe to your favorite ideas in order to receive update notifications - you can do this by clicking on an Idea and selecting the "Subscribe" button to receive email status updates.

UX modernization

Our goal is to deliver to you a modern, integrated platform with seamless interactions, simplified workflows, and embedded insights. And to be clear - this is not just a rebranding exercise. For the first time ever we are evaluating all of our user interfaces to make them consistent, easier to use, easier to understand, and overall focused on helping you achieve your objectives.

Acoustic will introduce a modernized interface for Campaign in late Q3 2020. Keep an eye out for training and webinars in the coming months as we prepare for the rollout of these enhancements!