Pega and the Customer Decisioning Hub

Whilst Pega is a wide and varied product suite with many innovative components adding huge value (especially when used together), this piece will focus on the Customer Decisioning Hub (CDH), and how it can drive value for its customers.

Founded by Alan Trefler in Cambridge, Massachusetts back in 1983 at the height of the microprocessor revolution, Pegasystems, or PEGA has built up a global following for its customer relationship and business process management software. More recently, with the acquisition of Chordiant in 2010 it gained an industry leading next best action capability to offer customers real-time decisioning.

Pega offers 1-to-1 Customer Engagement by allowing you to ensure that all communications with customers are contextually appropriate, which means they must be meaningful, consistent and personalised.

A paradigm shift

One of the key paradigm shifts for the traditional marketer when getting to grips with the Pega Decisioning Hub is the change in focus from batch marketing to primarily triggered messaging.  This messaging can be triggered by any touchpoint with your customers, e.g., adverts, apps, webpage, call centre.

This key concept is best explained in Pega’s own words:

“1-to-1 Customer Engagement enables companies to transition their marketing away from a traditional one-to-many campaign-driven approach. A one-to-one approach allows companies to have consistent, contextual and relevant conversations with individual customers across any channel or touch point.”

Pegasystems

This pivot to triggered messaging based off of customer activity reflects a modern twist on the age-old principle of marketing, that it is cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one, the CDH is in many ways a technological solution to this paradigm.

The Pega terminology

The terminology in the Pega CDH reflects this way of working towards more immediate and tangible outcomes:

Traditional outbound	Always-on outbound
Programs of Activity	Issues / Groups (Business objectives)
Marketing Campaign Briefs	Action requests (opportunities to send messages)

Whilst the core of the CDH is a Machine Learning algorithm fed by customer data, the algorithm is overlaid by rules that are defined by the marketer using the UI. This allows marketers to ensure their brand guidelines and core values as an organisation are adhered to. These rules are grouped accordingly by Eligibility, Applicability, Suitability and Targeting.

Frequency of Action requests can be tuned also according to business needs, e.g., you can decide that everyone who fits into a certain business issue is contacted at 6pm each day, or in real-time, if the need for communication is more acute or time sensitive, for example if you are a bank and the Issue is that someone’s card has just been retained by an ATM. These contact policies can also help prevent contact fatigue with customers, as communicating too much with a customer and causing an unsubscribe and a loss of brand credibility is worse than not communicating at all.

Naturally, this only scratches the surface of the capabilities within Pega CDH, but if you’d like to know more, why not get in touch today.