Question
How Inbound Channel initiate the Offer Flow?
This is regarding Multi-Channel Offers in Designing an offer for multi-channel customer engagement chapter in Certified Pega Marketing Consultant (V7.4) course.
As per below paragraph it is said that Inbound Channel can initiate the offer flow which is not yet launched, does it mean marketing campaign is not started? if so how does inbound channel (Next-Best-Action-Advisor) know about the offer about current customer who is on the call with an agent/CSR know about it?
If the offer is in in-flight it make sense that NBAA will get the information from DB about offer details to show it in CSR screen (section) that is configured in offer flow.
is my understanding correct? please advice.
Clarification on this much appreciated.
From training :
If a customer responds in the inbound channel to an Offer that is not yet launched, that is, an Offer that is not in-flight, then the system will start the Offer Flow from the Start flow shape. Since the Offer processing in the inbound channel is likely to be different than in the outbound channel, you need to use the ‘Which Channel’ decision table to determine the channel which is invoking the Offer Flow.
Regards
Pradeep
Hi Guru,
Thank you so much for detailed explanation. Real time container are the one I need to explore where after strategy is ready for campaign, it is used to be available for NBAM advisor.
I like the statement "some other offer which may be even more appropriate due to some business reasons" which could be the reason to pick this offer.
Thanks again!
Pradeep
Hi Pradeep
There are several points that need to be clarified separately to fully answer your post. Let me break it down one-by-one:
[Q1.0] Inbound Channel can initiate the offer flow
[A1.0] Initiating the offer is the second step in the process. The first step is to present the offer to the customer. First, the inbound application must know what offer to present. I will get back to the second step after I have clarified how the first step works.
[Q2.0] does it mean marketing campaign is not started?
[A2.0] It depends on the how the the inbound channel calls Pega Marketing. Read below for details.
[Q2.1] how does inbound channel (Next-Best-Action-Advisor) know about the offer about current customer who is on the call with an agent/CSR know about it?
[A2.1] Inbound channels call Pega Marketing by passing the CustomerID and some contextual information. Pega Marketing runs the appropriate decision strategy for that customer. The results are passed back to the calling application.
In Pega Marketing releases 6.x up to 7.11, inbound applications like Next-Best-Action Advisor used an internal API to invoke the appropriate strategy. There was no need to run a campaign.
Starting from Pega Marketing 7.12, the recommended approach for external applications to call Pega Marketing for Next-Best-Action decisions is via real-time containers. You can associate real-time containers with a campaign. You must keep this campaign in running mode so that it can "listen" to the real-time container requests and respond. When you go through the learning module "Web Marketing driven by Real-time Containers" further in the course, you'll learn how this works.
Starting from Pega Marketing 7.21, you can directly associate a real-time container with your Next-Best-Action decision hierarchy. When you are using this approach, there is no need to keep a campaign running. Please go through the learning module Optimizing the customer value in the contact center to understand how this works.
[Q2.2] If the offer is in in-flight it make sense that NBAA will get the information from DB about offer details
[A2.2] I'm sorry but statement is incorrect. In none of the cases does an inbound application get the offer details from a "database". In every case, the inbound application calls Pega Marketing in some way. Pega Marketing runs an appropriate decision strategy, and the results are passed back to the calling application. The decision strategy has access to the interaction history, which helps determine if an offer was made ("in-flight") or not. As a strategy designer, you are responsible to select the right offer, which could be the offers that are already made or some other offer which may be even more appropriate due to some business reasons.
[A1.0 continued] Now coming back to the offer invocation part: When a customer responds to the presented offer, the inbound application has to pass this response to Pega Marketing so that the interaction history is updated. For this, the inbound application uses an another API. Then, Pega Marketing will take care of a) either initiating an offer if it's not already initiated or b) moving the offer forward if it's already "in-flight". For the inbound application, it does not matter as it's the same API call.
Regards
Guru