Get started with Pega Customer Decision Hub (Pega Marketing)

Please go through our previous posts on Enterprise Design to understand what is an Application & what is a Framework Application in Pega.

Before getting started, let’s get familiar with few basic terminologies to understand the actual context better.

What is an Organization?

An organization is a group of individuals who work together for the same purpose/goal.

For example, Amazon is an organization with group of individuals (employees) who works together for the same goal (making use of technology and help their customers to find, discover & buy anything using internet).

Who is Customer?

Customer is an individual who has already bought product(s) from an organization & has contributed to the organization’s revenue.

HURRAY, I’ve ordered more than 100 times in Amazon and am a proud customer of Amazon organization 😎

Who is Prospect?

Prospect is an individual who can potentially be converted to a customer & can contribute to the revenue of the organization. Prospects can also be referred as leads.

Am a prospect of Amazon, since I’ve downloaded the Amazon application and have just added items to the cart without buying it. I can anytime be converted as a customer of Amazon once I complete the purchase.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is an action using which an Individual (or) Group (or) Organization can Sell (or) Promote their products to their Prospects (or) Customers through different channels.

For example, when Amazon launches a new product (air pod), it should market the product to their customers through their preferred channel (Email, SMS, Direct Mail, Call). Only then the customers will be notified and the interested customers would purchase the product.

What is Decisioning?

Not all organization will be interested in promoting all their products to their customers. Decisioning is the method of defining a best strategy to identify the relevant customers to target the product(s).

In the above example, Amazon has 2 new products (a basic mobile charger & air pod) for which amazon decides to have a strategy to target customers through SMS channel who has smart phone for air pod & the rest of the customers through Email channel with basic mobile for its new charger for basic set.

Let’s now get into the actual discussion on Pega Marketing/ CDH 📝

What is Pega Marketing (or) Pega CDH?

As we all know, day-to-day the usage of Pega technology is globally high since Pega has the capability to address many of the customer (organization) facing problems. One such problem that every organization has is, how best they can multiply their revenue by marketing their product to the right customers by defining an optimal strategy.

Pega comes up with an Out-of-the-box solution framework (Pega Marketing) which has the capability to,

• define customer/prospect base for an organization.
• market an organization’s product through campaign.
• collect statistics on the campaign.
• use the statistics/interactions for defining strategy for the future marketing.

Pega Marketing primarily helps an organization to balance between the customer needs with that of the business needs.

Starting from v8.x, Pega grouped the capabilities of Marketing & Decisioning into one bundle Pega Customer Decision Hub (CDH).

Pega Marketing/ CDH Architecture

Here is the OSP version of both inbound and outbound marketing architecture,

Inbound Marketing

Inbound is a type of marketing where Customer communicate with Pega through different channels to get the relevant offers. Inbound marketing can also be referred as Real-time marketing as it makes the decisions real-time.

For example, A customer on logging into Amazon website sees an air pod offer based on his/her recent purchase of One Plus mobile. As-soon-as the customer login, a call is made to Pega and the relevant offers are pulled and shown t the user. Here the call is inbound and the channel used is web.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound is a type of marketing where Pega communicate with customer through different channels to notify them on the relevant offers. Outbound marketing can also be referred as scheduled marketing as it is executed by an end-user in fixed time period.

For example, Amazon runs an outbound campaign to promote the launch of new product (air pod) to the customers through various channels who’s annual income is greater than 10L.

Installing Pega CDH application

Like all the software’s in Pega, CDH application can be downloaded from the Pega software delivery center provided if we have the proper licensing.

The downloaded product can be imported into the system by following the installation guide provided by Pega using normal application import process.

Once installed/imported, an implementation application can be created on top of the solution framework that can re-use or extend the marketing functionalities provided out-of-the-box from the framework.

Setting up a CDH application

Once the CDH application is installed, it’s required to set-up the below things before running a campaign,

• Verify if the marketing schema (ExternalMKTData) connectivity is success. All the marketing related tables sits in this schema and it’s a blob less schema.
• Setting up the customer/prospect table for the organization.
• Setting up the context dictionary with application specific variables.

Each of these setup can be seen in detail in our upcoming post where we will discuss about running a campaign for a real-time scenario in Pega marketing.

Pega Marketing Overview

Like case manager & case worker portal, marketing application comes with the Pega marketing portal which would be used by the marketing end users to create/maintain marketing artifacts and run campaigns.

In-order to run a campaign to promote/sell product(s), an organization requires the below artifacts,

• Eligible customers
• Marketing/Decisioning Strategy
• What is presented to the customer
• How it is presented to the customer

Let’s take a business scenario to understand each of these artifacts & its usage.

Business Scenario

OSP a banking application launches a new deposit scheme and wants to promote the scheme to the eligible customers of OSP bank.

Deposit scheme – 2 years deposit scheme with 10% interest rate with a minimum deposit amount of 5 Lakhs.

Eligibility criteria – to target customers with annual income greater than 5L per annum.

Business strategy – customer with Cibil score greater than 90 would be eligible for 10% interest rate and Cibil score less than 90 would be eligible for 8% interest rate.

Channel – Customer who has communication preference set as SMS should receive offers in SMS and rest of the customers should receive an email offer.

Implementation

As discussed earlier, to run a marketing campaign the below artifacts are required to be created,

• Eligible customers (Segment)
• Marketing/Decisioning Strategy (Strategy)
• What is presented to the customer (Offers/Proposition)
• How it is presented to the customer (Treatments)

Eligible customers

Our requirement says that customer whose annual income is greater than 5LPA are eligible for this offer. Hence the customers who satisfy this criteria should be grouped together and targeted by this campaign.

Pega marketing provides the capability to select the eligible customers for each campaign run using the rule called as Segments.

Marketing/ Decisioning Strategy

Providing deposit scheme to everyone with 10% interest rate would not satisfy the business needs in terms of revenue. Hence OPS bank wants to implement the below strategy for offer distribution,

• Cibil Score >=90, then return 10% interest rate
• Cibil Score <90, then return 8% interest rate

Pega marketing provides the capability to implement decisioning on top of the eligible customers using the rule called as Strategy.

What is Presented to the Customer

In our scenario, the new deposit scheme is the offer that is being presented to the customer. The main aspect of marketing is to keep track of statistics specific to marketing to determine the success and the failure of the product.

For example, after launching the product keeping track of how many has

• opened the offer
• accepted the offer
• rejected the offer
• ignored the offer

Pega marketing provides this capability by using the rule called Offer that provides the detailed statistics of the offer to support any of the decisioning need. Offers in Pega CDH can also be called as Actions.

How it is presented to the Customer

As per the given requirement, the new deposit scheme should be presented to the customers as email & sms based on the communication preference of the customer.

The logic to send the offers across channels is defined at the action level and the actual content is defined in Pega CDH using a rule called as Treatments.

We’re now at the end of the post and we hope the basics of Pega CDH and its components namely Segments, Strategy, Offers, Treatments is clear.

Let’s run a campaign using the above created artifacts and examine how Pega marketing helps organization promote their offers to their customers and capture each interactions in our upcoming post.

Stay tuned for more interesting posts on Pega CDH/ Marketing