Customer Profile Designer overview

The rise of digital channels means that more customer data is available than ever before. However, marketers still struggle to deliver compelling, highly relevant experiences that inspire long-term customer loyalty.

Bringing in new data is painful. Marketers rely on over-taxed IT and data science resources to configure data sources, build connections, and integrate the resulting customer signals into their applications.

Customer Profile Designer is part of Pega Customer Decision Hub and helps to simplify the complexity of using real-time data sources.

IT is still responsible for the initial setup and configuration of all data sources and connectors. However, business users have control of data usage with Customer Profile Designer. Its guided approach helps business users onboard and activate real-time data across customer engagement programs. Business users can also build additional data aggregations without any intervention from IT. As a result, business users rely less on IT support.

With Customer Profile Designer, you can define summaries on any streamable data source and easily assemble the customer profile by associating entities from the context dictionary. Business users can use these entities in engagement policies, and Data Scientists can include these entities as predictors in AI models to increase model performance.

Various data sources can increase the relevance of the next best actions that Customer Decision Hub determines. Some of this data can continuously flow into Customer Decision Hub through streams, while some data is more static in nature.

While static data is directly accessible, marketers can use Customer Profile Designer to design meaningful aggregation summaries with the streaming data.
Consider the following examples:

• The current product holdings of a customer allow you to determine which actions are applicable for the customer and help marketers define the correct engagement policies.
• Offline Model Scores from existing AI models can help uplift the performance of the predictions made by Customer Decision Hub.
• Clickstream data that the system generates from past customer behavior can be one of the strongest predictors. The number of times a customer logged in or visited a certain product page in the last hour, day, or month or the frequency with which a customer used a particular device to access the page can quickly reveal customer interests and current intent.
• Transactional purchase and usage data are essential to trigger the right action at the right moment.
• The past interactions of a customer help identify which actions are relevant or irrelevant.

Marketers begin by selecting the data sources and building the summaries that enrich the quality and accuracy of the next best actions.

With Customer Profile Designer, business users can quickly associate the selected data sources with the customer's profile. Every associated data source becomes available for use in Next-Best-Action Designer in engagement policies or as predictors in decisioning models.

Take a closer look at how Customer Profile Designer helps marketers summarize streaming data into meaningful aggregations. A common cross-industry use case is leveraging the web activity of a customer within Customer Decision Hub. The customer-facing website creates events that are continuously streamed into Customer Decision Hub.

Customer Decision Hub uses Stream Datasets to access the continuous flow of data. With Customer Profile Designer, users can create Summaries from the streamed data sets, such as the Web Clickstream. These summaries have several attributes defined by marketers that they can associate with the customer entity. An example of an aggregated attribute is the Cards Page Visit Last 1 Hour, which represents the number of times a customer visited the Card page in the last hour. Each attribute has a unique name, an aggregation function, a time window, and an aggregation logic.

Customer Decision Hub continuously calculates these aggregations and stores their values in a Cassandra-based data set for each customer.

The Customer Profile Designer accelerator component is available for download on Pega Marketplace. Businesses can use the component for industry-specific Pega Customer Decision Hub customers in the financial services, healthcare, or insurance industries. It serves as an accelerator to speed up implementation and as a framework for building more Customer Profile Designer summaries.

Pega Customer Decision Hub addresses a common bottleneck in project implementations. With Customer Profile Designer, you can import data through a standardized and well-defined process through data jobs. This process reduces significant development effort in projects and gives complete visibility of the data ingestion process.

Decisioning Architects can now create and manage real-time import data jobs that update the customer profile using stream data sources, such as Kafka, Kinesis, and Pega Stream. Updates to the customer profile occur in real-time, right after new data becomes available in the system of record.

It is also possible to use the import and export functions in Customer Profile Designer to import and export data in CSV format manually.

Customer Profile Designer helps design and populate your customer profile in the approach that follows Pega best practices.

It empowers business users by reducing their dependency on IT. It helps to build the framework to import data through an opinionated and standardized data ingestion process.

It allows users to quickly define and use summaries on streaming data such as customer activity, and static data that is imported into Customer Decision Hub or hosted on other infrastructure, as well as define new interaction history summaries and aggregations.
An accelerator component is available in Pega Marketplace to speed up implementation.