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Next-Best-Action Designer

Introduction

Next-Best-Action Designer guides you through the creation of a Next-Best-Action strategy for your business. Its intuitive interface, proven best practices and sophisticated underlying decisioning technology enable you to automatically deliver personalized customer experiences across inbound, outbound and paid channels. Next-Best-Action Designer is organized according to the high-level sequence of steps needed to configure the Next-Best-Action strategy for your organization.

Video

Transcript

Next-Best-Action Designer guides you through the creation of a Next-Best-Action strategy for your business. Its intuitive interface, proven best practices and sophisticated underlying decisioning technology enable you to automatically deliver personalized customer experiences across inbound, outbound and paid channels.

The Next-Best-Action Designer user interface allows you to easily define, manage and monitor Next-Best-Actions.

The tabs across the top of the user interface represent the steps that need to be completed to define Next-Best-Actions. 

Use the Taxonomy component to define the business structure for your organization.

Use the Constraints component to implement channel limits and constraints.

Use the Engagement policy component to define the rules that control which actions are offered to which customers.

Use the Arbitration component to configure how actions are prioritized.

Use the Channels component to configure when and where Next-Best-Action is triggered.

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The system uses these definitions to create an underlying Next-Best-Action Strategy framework. This framework leverages best practices to generate Next-Best-Action decision strategies at the enterprise level. These decision strategies are a combination of the business rules and AI models that form the core of the Pega Centralized Decision Hub, which determines the personalized set of Next-Best-Actions for each customer.

Use the Taxonomy component to define the hierarchy of Business Issues and Groups to which an action belongs. 

Business structure on the Taxonomy tab

A Business Issue is the purpose behind the actions you offer to customers. For example, actions with the purpose of retaining existing customers should be grouped under the business Issue of Retention. Actions with the purpose of acquiring new customers belong to the business Issue of Acquisition.

Business Groups are used to organize customer actions into categories. For example, as part of the business Issue of Acquisition, you can create Groups for products like Credit Cards, Mortgages, or Personal Loans, with the intention of offering these to potential customers.

Use Constraints to specify outbound contact limits as well as to limit overexposure to a specific action or group of actions.

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Customer contact limits allow you to limit the number of interactions that a customer can receive over a given period of time on a specific channel. For example, you can decide that you do not want your customers to receive more than two emails per week or two SMS messages per week.

On the Constraints tab of Next-Best-Action Designer, you can define more extensive suppression rules by creating Contact Policy rules in the library. Contact Policy rules are reusable across all Business Issues and Groups.

In the Contact Policy library, you define suppression rules that automatically put an action on hold after a specific number of outcomes are recorded for some or all channels. For example, an action can be suppressed for a customer for seven days after the customer has seen an ad for that action five times. Suppressing or pausing an action prevents over-exposure by limiting the number of times a customer is exposed to the same action.

Use Engagement policies to define when specific actions or groups of actions are appropriate for customers. 

Engagement policy tab

There are four types of engagement policies:

Eligibility determines whether or not a customer qualifies for an action or group of actions. For example, an action may only be available for customers over a specific age or living in a specific geographic location.

Applicability determines if an action or group of actions is relevant for a customer at a particular point in time. For example, a discount on a specific credit card may not be relevant for a customer who already owns a card.

Suitability determines if an action or group of actions is appropriate for a customer for ethical or empathetic reasons. For example, a new loan offer may not be appropriate for a customer whose credit score is low, even though it might be profitable for the bank.

Contact Policies determine when an action or group of actions should be suppressed and for how long. For example, you can suppress an action after a specific number of promotional messages has been sent to the customer. To activate Contact Policy rules created in the library on the Constraints tab, add them to the Engagement Policy tab.

Arbitration determines how the Customer Decision Hub prioritizes the list of eligible and appropriate actions that come out of each group. 

Arbitration tab

The factors weighed in arbitration are: Propensity, Context weighting, Action value, and Business levers, each represented by numerical values. A simple formula is used to arrive at a prioritization value, which is used to select the top actions.

Propensity is the likelihood of a customer responding positively to an action. This is calculated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). For example, a click on an offer banner or an accept of an offer in the contact center are considered positive behaviors.

Real-time contextual data is an important part of making highly relevant recommendations. Context weighting allows you to assign weighting to a specific context value for all actions within an Issue or Group. For example, if a customer contacts the bank to change their address, the weight of the Service context will increase, and the highest priority action will be to ensure that the relevant service is delivered to the customer.

Action value enables you to assign a financial value to an action and prioritize high-value actions over low-value ones. For example, promoting an unlimited data plan might be more profitable for the company than a limited data plan. Action values are typically normalized across Issues and Groups.

Business levers enable you to accommodate ad hoc business priorities by specifying a weight for an action or Group of actions and/or its associated Business Issue.

Next-Best-Action Designer enables Next-Best-Actions to be delivered via inbound, outbound and paid channels. 

Channels tab

These channels can be toggled on or off. If a channel is toggled off, the Next-Best-Actions will not be delivered to that channel.

An external real-time channel is any channel that presents actions selected by the Customer Decision Hub to a customer. These channels can include a website, or a call-center or mobile application. A real-time container is a placeholder for content in an external real-time channel.

A trigger is a mechanism whereby an external channel invokes the execution of a Next-Best-Action decisioning process for specific Issues and Groups. The result will be delivered back to the invoking channel. For example, when a real-time container called "Mortgages Landing Page" is configured, the website invokes this real-time container before loading the mortgage page.

As you have seen in this video, Next-Best-Action Designer is organized according to the high-level sequence of steps needed to configure the Next-Best-Action strategy for your organization. These steps involve:

  • Defining the business structure for your organization
  • Implementing the channel limits and constraints
  • Defining the rules that control which actions are offered to which customers
  • Configuring how actions are prioritized
  • Configuring when and where Next-Best-Action is triggered

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