Pegasystems PEGAPCDC87V1 Certified Pega Decisioning Consultant (PCDC) 87V1 Exam Practice Test

To update the underlying decision strategy of an engagement policy condition, the change request should be created in the 1:1 Operations Manager Portal. This portal is designed for business users to manage changes and revisions in a controlled environment.

Understanding the Portals:

1:1 Operations Manager Portal: This portal allows business users to manage and implement business changes, such as updating decision strategies and engagement policies.

Pega Customer Decision Hub Portal: This portal is used for overall customer decision management but not specifically for creating change requests.

Dev Studio Portal: This portal is more technical and used for developing and configuring applications.

Development Manager Portal: This is generally used for deployment and managing development pipelines.

Steps to Create a Change Request:

Step 1: Log into the 1:1 Operations Manager Portal.

Step 2: Navigate to the section where you can create a new change request.

Step 3: Specify the details of the change request, including the engagement policy and the decision strategy that needs to be updated.

Step 4: Submit the change request for approval and implementation.

Benefits:

Using the 1:1 Operations Manager Portal ensures that changes are tracked, reviewed, and approved through a formal process, maintaining governance and control over business operations.

Example:

U+ Bank wants to update the decision strategy for credit card offers. A change request is created in the 1:1 Operations Manager Portal, detailing the required updates to the engagement policy conditions.

References:

Pega-Customer-Decision-Hub-User-Guide-85.pdf: "Managing business-as-usual changes with Pega 1:1 Operations Manager" section.

Pega documentation on "Revision management and change request process".

Initial Configuration: U+ Bank has implemented Pega Customer Decision Hub for the contact center and now wants to extend it to the web channel.

Understand Channel Configuration: Pega CDH requires the configuration of channels in the Next-Best-Action Designer to ensure that treatments are correctly recommended.

Modify the Strategy Framework:

Next-Best-Action Framework: This strategy framework is used to determine the best actions for customers across various channels. It needs to be modified to include configurations specific to the web channel.

Steps to Modify:

Access Next-Best-Action Designer: Navigate to the Next-Best-Action Designer.

Channels Tab: Configure the new web channel in the Channels tab.

Modify the Strategy: Update the Next-Best-Action Framework strategy to incorporate the new web channel. This involves ensuring the new actions and treatments are included and prioritized correctly for the web channel.

According to the Pega Customer Decision Hub User Guide, modifying the framework strategy to cater to new channels is necessary for extending customer engagement (Reference: Pega-Customer-Decision-Hub-User-Guide-85.pdf, Chapter on "Understanding Next-Best-Action Designer channels").

Testing and Validation:

Test the new configurations to ensure treatments for the web channel are correctly recommended in the next-best-action suggestions.

Conclusion: To configure the new treatments for the web channel in the next-best-action recommendations, the Next-Best-Action Framework strategy must be modified to cater to the new web channel.

Business Issues and Groups in Pega CDH - Business issues (like Sales, Service, Retention) categorize customer engagement strategies. Each issue can have multiple groups representing specific goals (e.g., credit cards, loans under Sales).

Retention Issue - Since the objective is to retain customers who are at high risk of leaving, modifying the Retention issue aligns the strategy with the goal of reducing churn.

Steps to Modify Retention Issue:

Navigate to the Next-Best-Action Designer.

Select the Retention issue.

Update or create new applicability settings to identify high churn risk customers.

Configure actions (proactive retention offers) to be presented to these customers.

To use a customer property in an expression within a decision strategy in Pega, follow these steps:

Identify the Customer Property:

Determine the specific customer property you want to use in your strategy.

Prefix with 'Customer':

In Pega, customer properties are accessed by prefixing them with the keyword Customer. This ensures that the property is correctly referenced from the customer data.

Use the Property in Expression:

When defining an expression in a decision strategy, include the Customer prefix. For example, if the property is Age, use Customer.Age.

Verify Property Definition:

Ensure that the property is correctly defined in the data model and accessible within the strategy context.

References:

Pega Customer Decision Hub User Guide 8.6: Understanding the Context Dictionary, Configuring the Context Dictionary​​.

Proposition Data Components - These components in a decision strategy are used to import and reference actions or propositions.

Requirement - The strategy designer wants to import all actions from one group and a subset from another.

Minimum Number Calculation:

One component for importing all 10 actions from the Sales/Credit Cards group.

Another component for importing the 2 specific actions from the Sales/Mortgages group.

 Understanding Engagement Policies: Pega Customer Decision Hub uses engagement policies like eligibility, applicability, and suitability to determine if an action should be presented to a customer.

 Eligibility Criteria: These criteria define whether a customer qualifies for an action.

 Bank's Requirement: U+ Bank wants to avoid offering a mortgage refinance option to customers who have less than 5% left on their loan.

 Best Fit: The eligibility policy best suits this requirement as it allows the bank to set specific criteria (loan balance percentage) to exclude certain customers from receiving the offer​​.

 Volume Constraints Implementation: To implement a policy that limits the sending of more than 500 emails per day, you need to configure volume constraints. Volume constraints allow you to set limits on the number of actions delivered within a specified period.

 Configuration: Create a volume constraint rule and set the maximum volume to 500 emails per day.

Scorecard Classification - Classifications in a scorecard can segment customers based on score ranges into categories like Not Approved, Refer to Manager, and Approved.

pxSegment Property - This property holds the classification result, which can be used in decision strategies to take appropriate actions based on the classification.

Steps to Use pxSegment:

Ensure the scorecard rule includes the classification bands.

In the decision strategy, reference the pxSegment property to check the classification result.

Use this property in filters, decision points, or to route customers to different actions based on their classification.

Ensuring Latest Customer Information: To ensure that the outbound run always uses the latest customer information, you need to select the "Refresh the audience" option. This setting ensures that the audience is refreshed with the most recent customer data before the campaign is executed.

Implementation: Navigate to the campaign configuration and select the option to refresh the audience before running the campaign. This guarantees that any changes or updates to the customer data are taken into account.

Decision Table Results: In Pega, the standard property that holds the result of a decision table evaluation is pxOutcome.

Property Usage: This property can be used to reference the result of the decision table within a decision strategy.

References: This usage of pxOutcome is consistent with Pega's approach to handling results from decision tables and mapping these results into strategies .

To present a free 2GB data offer when customers contact the call center for mobile number portability, you should configure context weighting in Pega Customer Decision Hub. Context weighting allows you to prioritize actions based on the specific context of the interaction, such as the reason for the call. By setting a higher weight for the free data offer in the context of mobile number portability, you can ensure this offer is prioritized when relevant.

Business Levers: These are used to apply weights to different actions or groups of actions to influence their prioritization based on business objectives.

Context Weighting: This factor is used to adjust the priority of actions based on the specific context of the customer interaction, ensuring that both business objectives and customer needs are balanced.

References: The configuration and utilization of business levers and context weighting within the Next-Best-Action Designer are key components in aligning the decision strategy with both business and customer goals .

Next-Best-Action Communication: Effective Next-Best-Action communication is both contextual and timely.

Contextual: Ensures that the actions or offers presented are relevant to the customer's current situation and preferences.

Timely: Ensures that the actions or offers are presented at the most appropriate time for maximum impact and engagement.

Pega Customer Decision Hub can be applied to various types of decisions, including determining how to retain a customer. It leverages decision management and AI technologies to analyze customer data, predict behaviors, and recommend personalized actions that can help improve customer retention and satisfaction.

To ensure that a customer does not see offers on their account page if they have already received three home loan offers in the last two weeks, you need to define customer contact limits. These limits allow you to control the number of times a customer can be contacted with specific types of offers within a given timeframe, thus preventing overexposure and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Next-Best-Action Strategy Application: Pega's Next-Best-Action strategy can be applied to various business issues to optimize decision-making and enhance customer interactions.

Collections: Used to manage and optimize debt collection processes by determining the best actions to take with customers who have outstanding debts.

Service: Enhances customer service interactions by suggesting the most relevant actions or responses to customer inquiries and issues.

Retention: Focuses on retaining customers by identifying and executing actions that are most likely to keep them engaged and loyal.

Debugging Arbitration - To verify if the result of the arbitration is correct, the Prioritize component in the strategy shows the final ranking of actions.

Prioritize Component - This component ranks actions based on their calculated priority scores.

Steps:

Review the Prioritize component in the strategy.

Check the priority scores assigned to each action.

Ensure that the actions with the highest propensities are ranked at the top.

 Engagement Policy Condition: For offering a Fiber Optic Cable package only to customers in towns with fiber optic availability, the best engagement policy condition to use is "Eligibility." Eligibility conditions are used to ensure that only customers who meet specific criteria (e.g., geographic location) are considered for the offer.

 Implementation: Define an eligibility condition in the engagement policy that checks whether the customer resides in a town with fiber optic cable availability.

Understanding the Scenario:

There are two segments: Segment A and Segment B.

Segment A references Segment B.

The goal is to ensure that Segment B is automatically refreshed when Segment A is refreshed.

Segment Refresh Settings:

Refreshable Segment: This setting determines if a segment can be refreshed automatically.

Refresh Child Segments: This setting ensures that when a parent segment is refreshed, all its child segments are also refreshed.

Configuration Requirement:

To achieve the automatic refresh of Segment B when Segment A is refreshed, you need to enable both the Refreshable option for Segment B and the Refresh Child Segments option for Segment A.

Implementation:

Segment A: Enable the Refresh Child Segments option.

Segment B: Enable the Refreshable option.

Correct Configuration:

The correct configuration is to set Segment A with Refresh Child Segments enabled and Segment B with Refreshable enabled.

The condition that possibly prevents Anna from seeing the new Rewards card offer is "Eligibility." Since Anna already holds a higher value card, Premier Rewards, the eligibility criteria might exclude her from receiving offers for the Rewards card. This ensures that customers are not offered products that are less relevant or valuable compared to what they already have.

To ensure that the Gold credit card offer is presented only to customers who have an annual income of more than USD 150,000, you need to configure an engagement policy condition in the Next-Best-Action Designer. Here’s why:

Engagement Policy Condition:

Engagement policies in the Next-Best-Action Designer are used to define conditions that determine whether a particular action (such as offering a Gold credit card) is suitable or eligible for a customer.

By setting an engagement policy condition based on the customer's annual income, you ensure that only those customers who meet the specified income threshold are eligible to receive the offer.

This condition acts as a filter that evaluates each customer’s income and includes only those who earn more than USD 150,000.

Scorecard Component - This component in Pega CDH is designed to evaluate attributes and produce a score based on those attributes. It is commonly used for calculating credit scores, risk scores, etc.

Steps to Use Scorecard:

In the decision strategy, add a Scorecard component.

Configure the scorecard to include relevant customer attributes (e.g., payment history, credit utilization).

Set the rules and weights for each attribute to calculate the final credit score.

Use the score in further decision logic (e.g., filtering out customers with a score below 500).

To update the cashback offer to be presented through a new channel (SMS) and to update the suitability condition, you need to perform two main tasks: adding a new treatment and editing the engagement policy.

Add a New Treatment:

Step 1: Navigate to the "Actions" section in the Pega Customer Decision Hub.

Step 2: Locate the existing cashback offer action.

Step 3: Add a new treatment specifically for the SMS channel. This involves creating a new SMS treatment that defines the message content, format, and any other relevant details.

Step 4: Ensure the new treatment is linked to the cashback offer action.

Edit the Engagement Policy:

Step 1: In the Pega Customer Decision Hub, go to the "Engagement Policies" section.

Step 2: Locate the engagement policy associated with the cashback offer.

Step 3: Update the suitability condition by lowering the debt-to-income ratio threshold from 48 to 45. This ensures that the new condition is applied when evaluating customer eligibility for the cashback offer.

Step 4: Save and publish the updated engagement policy to ensure it takes effect.

Verify the Changes:

Step 1: Test the new SMS treatment by sending test messages to a seed list to verify the content and formatting.

Step 2: Ensure that the updated engagement policy correctly filters customers based on the new debt-to-income ratio threshold.

References:

Pega-Customer-Decision-Hub-User-Guide-85.pdf: "Defining treatments for actions" and "Configuring engagement policies" sections.

Pega documentation on "Creating and managing actions" and "Editing engagement policies".

To access a property from an unconnected component in Pega Customer Decision Hub, you use the component-dot-property construct. This allows you to reference properties from other components within your strategy by specifying the component name followed by the property name. This construct helps in accessing and using data across different components without directly connecting them.

To ensure that customers do not receive more than four promotional emails per quarter, you can use customer contact limits. This setting allows you to define the maximum number of contacts a customer can receive over a specific period, regardless of their responses to previous actions. By setting this limit, you can prevent overcommunication and enhance customer experience.

 Business Structure: Setting up the business structure to Sales/CreditCards ensures that the actions and offers are correctly categorized and managed within the appropriate business context.

 Real-Time Container: Creating and configuring a real-time container is necessary for presenting the credit card offer to customers in real-time as they log in to the website.

 Action and Web Treatment: Defining the action and configuring its web treatment ensures that the offer is ready to be displayed to the customers, complete with the necessary details and presentation format.

 Translating Traditional Segments: When moving away from traditional marketing to always-on outbound capabilities in Pega Customer Decision Hub, translating traditional segments is essential to identify the target audience correctly.

 Segmentation Configuration: In Pega, segmentation rules are configured to define and group customers based on various attributes. This allows the system to identify the right target audience for outbound campaigns.

Correct Order of Implementation:

Create a change request

Define action details and engagement policies

Rank the change request

Perform persona testing

Approve the change request

Complete and deploy the revision

Step by Step Comprehensive Detailed Explanation with References:

Create a change request:

The first step is to create a change request within the Business Operations Environment. This involves initiating a request for the new offer and specifying what needs to be changed or added.

With the volume constraints applied (75 maximum daily actions for StandardCard, 50 maximum daily actions for Email, and 50 maximum daily actions for SMS), the outbound run will deliver a total of 75 actions. This includes actions across different channels while adhering to the specified constraints.

To manage the communication between Pega Customer Decision Hub and external channels for promoting new offers to each customer on their website, you need to configure a Real-time Container. Real-time Containers are used to deliver personalized content and actions to customers in real-time, based on their interactions with the website and other channels. They ensure that the most relevant offers are presented to each customer in a timely and contextually appropriate manner.

Enrichment Components - These are used to add additional information or modify properties within a decision strategy.

Setting Text Values:

Enrichment components can be configured to set or modify strategy properties.

This includes setting text values, numerical values, or other types of data.

Steps:

In the decision strategy, add an Enrichment component.

Define the target property and the value to be set.

This value can be static text or dynamically generated based on other strategy components.

To test the visualization and rendering of the email content, including the replacement of placeholders with customer information, you use a seed list from the Test Message tab. A seed list allows you to send test emails to a predefined group of recipients, ensuring that the dynamic content is correctly rendered and personalized before the actual campaign is launched.

Understand the Scenario: A Customer Service Representative (CSR) presents an offer to a customer, and the customer rejects the offer.

Next Step in Pega CDH:

In Pega Customer Decision Hub, when an offer is rejected, the system typically reevaluates the Next-Best-Action. This means it reassesses the available actions to determine the most appropriate next step for the customer based on current context and customer data.

To enable the website to communicate with the Pega Customer Decision Hub and show the Reward Card offer to qualified customers, you need to:

Enable the web channel in the Next-Best-Action Designer's Channel tab. This step activates the web channel for inbound interactions, allowing the system to deliver personalized actions to customers visiting the website.

Map the real-time container to a business structure level. This ensures that the container is correctly linked to the business context, allowing the system to deliver the right offers based on the customer’s interactions with the website.

 Grouping Actions: To calculate the total number of customer responses of four actions in a group, you need to use one Group By component. This component can aggregate responses across multiple actions within a strategy.

 Implementation: Add a Group By component to the decision strategy, configure it to group by the desired property, and aggregate the responses from the four actions.

 Requirement:

U+ Bank has added five new actions to the Credit Cards group and wants to enable these actions in the email channel.

 Configuring Each Action with an Email Treatment:

Each action must be configured with an appropriate treatment for the email channel.

Treatments define how the actions are presented in the channel, including the content and format of the email.

This step ensures that the actions are prepared to be sent via email with the correct content.

Interaction History Summary - This rule aggregates data like customer responses, action outcomes, and interactions over a set time period.

Steps to Create the Rule:

In Dev Studio, go to Configure -> Decisioning -> Decisions -> Data Sources -> Interaction History Summaries.

Create a new summary rule.

Set the time period to 20 days.

Define the interaction data to be tracked (e.g., accepts, rejects).

Benefits - Enables precise tracking of customer engagement and responses, facilitating better decision strategies based on historical data.

Business Requirement: The need is to implement risk segmentation rules based on age and credit score.

Decision Table Integration: The decision table can be added to the decision strategy where it will evaluate the credit score and age, and then assign the appropriate risk segment.

Parameter Passing: The decision table within the strategy will use the credit score passed to it as a parameter to determine the segmentation.

References: Pega's methodology for incorporating decision tables into strategies for evaluating and segmenting customers based on specific criteria is well documented in the user guides .

Goal of Next-Best-Action: The primary goal of Next-Best-Action is to balance customer needs with business objectives. This approach ensures that actions taken are beneficial for both the customer and the business, leading to better engagement and outcomes.

To present offers based on the responses of a test group that already received the offer, you should configure the propensity factor in Pega Customer Decision Hub. Propensity models predict the likelihood of a customer accepting an offer based on historical data and responses from similar customers. By leveraging propensity, you can ensure that offers are presented to customers who are most likely to respond positively, based on the behavior of the test group.

To configure the arbitration factor for nudging the Platinum Plus credit card to customers who visit the home page, you need to focus on action value. Action value takes into account the business value or importance of an action, which aligns with the goal of promoting a specific credit card to customers.

Arbitration in Pega CDH - Arbitration is the process of ranking actions based on their priority. Factors like propensity, context weighting, action value, and business levers are considered during arbitration.

Action Value - This factor assesses the intrinsic value of an action, which includes its business value. It is crucial when a business objective, like promoting a specific credit card, needs to be prioritized.

Implementation - By configuring action value, you ensure that the Platinum Plus credit card offer has a higher priority over other actions for customers visiting the homepage.

Customer Properties - These are attributes related to the customer, such as demographics, behavior, and engagement history.

Expression Syntax:

When defining expressions in decision strategies, customer properties must be prefixed with "Customer."

For example, to use the customer's age, you write Customer.Age.

Steps:

In the decision strategy, select the component where you need to use the customer property.

Write the expression using the "Customer" prefix.

 Context of Scorecard Update:

MyCo updated their scorecard rule to include a new property, customer annual income, for computing the postpaid credit limit.

This update affects how the scorecard calculates the credit limit.

 Impact on Decision Strategy:

The scorecard rule automatically includes the new property in its calculations.

The decision strategy references the scorecard rule as a whole, not individual properties.

 Reason for No Change Required:

Since the scorecard rule is updated independently, the decision strategy using this rule will automatically reflect the new calculations.

There is no need to manually update the decision strategy to accommodate this change.

 Verification from Pega Documentation:

Pega's documentation confirms that updates to scorecard rules are automatically integrated into decision strategies using those rules.

To define a contact policy that suppresses an action for 20 days if it was rejected twice in any channel in the last 30 days, you need to specify the suppression rule as follows: "Suppress an action for 20 days if there are 2 rejects for any channel in the last 30 days." This rule ensures that the action is paused after it has been rejected a specified number of times across any channel within the given timeframe.

To ensure that Silver credit cards are not offered to customers under 27 years of age and that Platinum cards are offered only to customers who had a positive balance in the last year, you need to configure "Engagement policies" in the Next-Best-Action Designer. Engagement policies allow you to set criteria such as eligibility, applicability, and suitability for actions. For this scenario, you would set the eligibility criteria to ensure the age and balance conditions are met before the offers are presented.

Correct Engagement Policy Configuration:

The customer must not be flagged as a defaulted borrower

Engagement policy: Eligibility

Customer already owns a higher-value offer

Engagement policy: Applicability

Must be a resident of New York City

Engagement policy: Eligibility

The savings product offers are relevant only if the customer has not explicitly opted out of direct marketing

Engagement policy: Applicability

Inappropriate for customers with a credit score < 300 as they are likely to default

Engagement policy: Suitability

The customer must not be flagged as a defaulted borrower

Eligibility: Eligibility conditions determine whether a customer qualifies for an offer at a basic level. Being flagged as a defaulted borrower is a fundamental criterion to disqualify a customer from receiving certain offers.

In designing the next-best-action prioritization expression that balances customer needs with business objectives, you need to consider "Predicted customer behavior." This factor involves using predictive models to forecast how customers are likely to respond to different actions, ensuring that the recommended actions are both relevant to the customer and aligned with business goals.

Email treatments in Pega Customer Decision Hub allow for personalization, including customizing the email subject to address the customer by name or other personalized data.

Definition and Purpose:

Email treatments are used to define the content and presentation of email communications sent to customers as part of outbound campaigns.

Personalization enhances the relevance and engagement of these emails by including customer-specific information.

Capabilities of Email Treatments:

Personalization Tags: Pega supports the inclusion of dynamic tags in the email subject and body, allowing for personalized greetings, offers, and other content. For example, "Dear " where "" is dynamically replaced with the actual name of the customer.

HTML Content: Design rich email content using HTML, which can include images, links, and other multimedia elements.

Steps to Personalize Email Subjects:

Step 1: Create or edit an email treatment in Pega.

Step 2: In the subject line field, use the syntax for personalization tags. For example, "Dear , check out our new offers!".

Step 3: Map the personalization tags to the appropriate customer data fields to ensure the correct information is inserted when the email is sent.

Testing Personalization:

Use seed lists to test personalized emails. Seed lists are groups of test email addresses used to preview how the email will look when sent to actual customers.

Ensure that personalization attributes appear correctly in the received test emails.

Best Practices:

Always test personalized emails thoroughly before launching a campaign to ensure that the tags are working correctly and the content renders as expected.

Use personalization to enhance customer engagement by making emails feel more relevant and tailored to individual recipients.

References:

Pega-Customer-Decision-Hub-User-Guide-85.pdf: "Configuring email treatments" section.

Pega documentation on "Defining an action for outbound".