Working of the always-on brain in outbound

Customers are more empowered than ever before. As a result, they have very high expectations of the experiences they receive from their service providers. These experiences must be meaningful, consistent, and personalized across every channel they interact with.

In alignment with customer expectations, Pega Customer Decision Hub™ is designed to deliver the right message, to the right customer, at the right time, on the right channel.

This approach not only provides a better experience for customers, it helps the business improve its customer relationships over the long term.

Pega Customer Decision Hub is the “always-on brain” that acts as a single, centralized decision authority.

The always-on brain carries out 1:1 customer engagement across channels.

“Always-on” means that the brain constantly monitors each customer’s context across channels. When it detects a need, it selects and delivers the appropriate offer, retention message, or service recommendation in the customer’s preferred channel.

The brain uses data about the customer, including past behavior, profile information, and contextual data that may, for example, stream from their device, as input. It leverages advanced AI techniques to predict customer context, propensities, and relevance. It also uses stored decision strategies to trigger messages and actions at the moment the customer will be most receptive to them. As a centralized resource, the brain enables you to deliver consistent and personalized Next-Best-Actions across all channels

Customer interactions take place on various channels, which can be broadly classified as “owned” and “paid”.

Owned channels are the channels owned by the business, such as a self-service web portal, contact center, or mobile application. In these channels, the business has more control over customer engagement activities.

Paid channels are owned by a third party, for example, social media platforms such as Google and Facebook. Businesses have to pay to use these channels for customer engagement activities.

Owned channels can be further classified as inbound and outbound channels.

An inbound channel is used when a customer approaches the business, via, for example, a self-service web portal.

An outbound channel is used by the business to send a message to the customer, via, for example, email or SMS.

The flow of information and the mechanics of delivering Next-Best-Actions is different in inbound and outbound channels.

When a customer interaction takes place on an inbound channel, the channel identifies the customer, then the brain evaluates the Next-Best-Action for that customer and sends the result back to the same channel, in real-time. The customer’s response to the action is recorded by the system, and the cycle repeats.

Always-on outbound means that the brain sends outbound messages, via email or SMS, to customers only when it’s appropriate.

This can happen in three ways:

1) Scheduled update: The brain is configured to proactively send out messages on a scheduled basis when relevant. It evaluates the Next-Best-Action for each customer identified in a segment, which contains the potential list of customers to whom you want to send messages. In most cases, customer responses arrive after the message has been sent. When customers respond, the responses are recorded in the system and used in the subsequent Next-Best-Action evaluation.

2) Customer event: When a customer event is detected that is of significance to the business, for example, a customer abruptly ends an online transaction, data is received via the event stream. The brain then evaluates the Next-Best-Action and sends the resulting action, such as a notification email with a link to continue the incomplete transaction, to the customer. In this case, the outbound message is triggered only for the customer for whom the event occurred.

3) Priority communication: In extreme circumstances, you may want to contact all or a subset of your customers outside the regularly scheduled update. In such cases, you would configure the brain to send out a high-priority communication to those customers. This would be a one-off communication and won’t be repeated automatically by the system.