Business conditions overview

Business conditions allow citizen developers to easily configure a Pega Customer Service™ application to support relevant, consistent, and personalized customer interactions across channels. When enabled, business conditions run an evaluation against a set of criteria. When the criteria are met, areas that have been configured will automatically update.

Business conditions can be used to configure the following features:

1. Customer verification – business conditions will suggest the right set of customer verification questions for the Customer Service Representative (CSR) to ask at the start of an interaction or service request. For example, in the healthcare sector, a person calling the helpdesk can either be an end-customer or a service provider. Each should be presented with different verification questions. A business condition can be used to evaluate account information and present the right set of questions to the CSR.
   
2. Customer composite – business conditions can determine and display the most appropriate customer composite tabs and widgets at the start of an interaction. For example, in banking, business conditions will be able to determine whether the person calling has one or multiple accounts. If they do have multiple accounts, the Interaction Portal will display the multiple accounts widget as part of the customer composite. 
   
3. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) – business conditions provide the IVR and IVA bots with an appropriate set of responses during an incoming call. For example, in banking, reports can show a pattern of managers within a certain region contacting Customer Support to request a statement copy. In such cases, IVR can be set to suggest the appropriate case type to those managers based on their location and function, without the need to connect with the CSR.
4. Intelligent guidance – business conditions suggest the most appropriate next action for the CSR to take. For example, if a customer has no email address associated with their account, the Interaction Portal will display the corresponding case type (update email address) in the Intelligent guidance section at the start of the interaction.
   

Pega Customer Service includes out-of-the-box business conditions for common customer service use cases. Citizen developers can add new business conditions in App Studio as required.

A business condition can analyze data from various sources, such as the case, account, or contact. When you select a scope, you choose a value that represents the source of the information that you want this business condition to evaluate, as well as the area to which the business condition applies.

When the objective for creating a business condition is to dynamically configure the interaction portal (for example, to suggest the next best action for the CSR to perform), All Cases should be selected as the scope. This ensures that the business condition can access all the properties that are available in the current case type, as well as in the interaction itself (for example, account information). All Cases is the default scope for a newly created business condition.

Apart from All Cases, you can set the scope to data, such as Account or Contact. This allows you to create self-contained business conditions that can serve as building blocks for multiple other, more complex business conditions. For example, you can create a business condition to reference Platinum customers in your business. For a customer to be labeled as Platinum, they must maintain a balance of $ 5,000 in their accounts. If you keep a separate business condition defining the threshold value for Platinum customers, any modifications you make to the threshold value will automatically be applied in all the places that the business condition is used.