Channel Integration with Pega Customer Decision Hub
Channel Integration with Pega Customer Decision Hub
Background
The Pega Customer Decision HubTM next-best-action capabilities are based on a decisioning paradigm that relies on customer insights, business strategies, propensity models, and context-specific information to determine the most suitable action to present to a customer at every interaction point with the customer.Channel applications are the various client applications that are used to interact with the client’s customers. They include agent-assisted applications supporting call centers and branches as well as self-service applications such as web, mobile, ATM, and IVR.The next-best-action processing workflow starts when the customer interacts with a channel application. At that point, the channel application retrieves one or more next best actions for the customer by calling the Customer Decision Hub application. The application processes the request and returns the appropriate next best actions and personalization parameters (content URLs, salutations, offer characteristics, etc.). In turn, the channel application assembles the content which is presented to the customer (self-service) or agent (call center, branch). The customer, after reviewing the next best actions, may choose to accept, reject, or simply ignore the offers. These responses are relayed back to the Customer Decision Hub application by the channel application.
For the Customer Decision Hub application, channel integration includes the tasks performed by the client’s channel management team to integrate to the Customer Decision Hub application as well as the tasks performed by the Customer Decision Hub team.Client tasks include the technical analysis, design, development, and testing of the client’s channel application that will access Customer Decision Hub; request next best actions for presentation to customers; assemble and present the next best action to the customer and record and return the customer’s response to the presented next best actions. In addition to the channel integration activities, the client might need to include training for call center and branch personnel.
Customer Decision Hub provides two product APIs which will be consumed as web services by the channel application:
- The first service is the Container service which will select, prioritize, and make available next best actions (Actions). For self-service applications like web and mobile, the Actions can be presented directly to the member, and for agent-assisted applications like call center and branch, the Actions are presented to the agent for presentation to the member.
- The second service is the captureResponse service which will receive the member’s response to the presented Action (Accept, Reject, etc.). Note: Pega Adaptive Model propensities are calculated based on the member’s response to the presented Action.
For more information about configuring and using real time containers in Customer Decision Hub, see: Managing content in real-time channels with real-time containers on Pega Documentation.
As previously identified, if the next best action requires content to be displayed with it (e.g. images, scripts, etc.) a link for the content is included in the next best action information passed to the channel application. And if the channel application requires information to personalize the content, that information can either be retrieved directly from source data or, if available in the Customer Decision Hub, the data can be passed as part of the next best actions provided to the channel application.
In addition to processing the next-best-action-related channel requests, the Customer Decision Hub application outputs the response data from the captureResponse service to the Customer Decision Hub Interaction History data stores, and this data can be exported to client analytics and reporting applications.
The following is a simplified conceptual diagram illustrating the various Pega CDH components and their relationship to integration with the channel applications (lower left):
Container service
For more information about configuring the Container service, see: Triggering a real-time container with the Container REST service on Pega Documentation.
captureResponse service
For more information about configuring the captureResponse service, see: Capturing responses to actions triggered by a real-time container on Pega Documentation.