Decision strategies

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 the next best actions.

As you use the Next-Best-Action Designer user interface to define strategy criteria, the system uses these criteria to create the 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 Customer Decision Hub, which determines the personalized set of next best actions for each customer.

If you want to modify the strategy later, you can do that from Next-Best-Action Designer’s simple and transparent interface.

The strategy framework is applied to all relevant Actions and Treatments after you define a Trigger in the Next-Best-Action Designer Channels tab.

Each Trigger generates a strategy that first imports the Actions from the appropriate level of the business structure and then applies the Eligibility, Applicability, and Suitability rules.

The strategy then passes these results to the strategy framework for processing.

There are several extension points within the framework. An extension point is an empty rule or activity that is intended to be overridden to meet the specific needs of the application. When building an implementation of the current framework, the decision strategy designers must override the empty activity with a functioning interface to their customer master file.

This is the next-best-action framework strategy when applied to each of the Actions.

The first component within the strategy framework is an extension point for any Action pre-processing you might need to perform.

The last functional component within the strategy framework is another extension point for any post-processing that must be performed.

Similarly, there are many other extension points such as the outbound limits extension points and business value extension points.

To ensure upgradeability, avoid overriding any part of the framework that is not a designated extension point.

Also, the generated framework has some extension points where you can create strategies.

For example, while configuring values for Arbitration, you can specify a business value for an Action, or you can use a strategy to calculate the value. This can be done by adding a strategy to the existing framework.

Similarly, in defining the engagement rules, you can use a new strategy as a definition instead of an existing condition. Strategy designers can create such strategies from scratch using the decision strategy canvas.

Or, while defining the suppression rules, you can add a strategy to define new suppression rule limits instead of the existing 7 or 30 days.

For example, in the screenshot below, the CheckSpecificChannelLimits rule has been extended to have a 15-day limit:

In conclusion, Next-Best-Action Designer provides a guided and intuitive UI to bootstrap your application development with proven best practices. Next-Best-Action Designer generates the underlying strategies for you, which can be extended using existing values in the designated extension points or by building decision strategies from scratch, depending on the business requirement.