Contact policies – Suppression time to live set indefinitely.

The Customer Decision Hub (CDH) engineering team have discovered a product defect for clients updating to Next-Best-Action Designer (NBA) 24.1 without applying HFIX-B2261. This defect leads to the Contact policy suppression (Action Insights) Time to live (TTL) to be set to 0, which means they will be applied to decision results indefinitely.

Which Clients are affected?

This defect affects clients with NBA originally configured on Customer Decision Hub versions 8.6 or earlier, who have recently updated to Customer Decision Hub 24.1 release, without HFIX-B2261 applied. The hotfix must be applied before starting the update process.

Example 1: Your initial implementation of NBA was on CDH version 8.6. You then updated your implementation to 8.8. Now you have updated to the 24.1 release, without applying HFIX-B2261, prior to starting the Next Best Action Designer update. You are likely to experience this issue.

Example 2: Your initial implementation of NBA was on CDH version 8.5. You then updated your implementation to 23.1. Now you have updated to the 24.1 release, without applying HFIX-B2261, prior to starting the Next Best Action Designer update. You are likely to experience this issue.

Pega is proactively notifying clients since this issue could lead to unexpected outcomes in the form of Next-Best-Action results being filtered out beyond the expected timeframe.

What are Contact Policy suppressions and time-to-live? 

Contact policies ensure Next-Best-Actions aren’t over-communicated to customers within a defined time-period.  These policies are defined on the Constraints tab of NBA in the CDH Portal.  Each policy limit provides for the number of days a Next-Best-Action will be suppressed or filtered out of the decision results.  This duration is referred to as the time-to-live or TTL.

Issue:

The TTL for a Contact policy suppression, technically referred to as an Action Insight, will be set to 0 for all suppression records for all customers. 

NOTE:  This only impacts implementations originally configured on CDH 8.6 or earlier, using Next-Best-Action Designer, which have already updated or plan to update to 24.1, without applying HFIX-B2261 before starting the update process.

• On-premises and client-managed cloud implementations should apply critical HFIX-B2261 prior to updating to Next-Best-Action Designer release 24.1.
• Pega Cloud clients should confirm HFIX-B2261 was automatically applied, as part of the update process, when updating to CDH 24.1 release.

Problem root cause:

With the 24.1 CDH release, the property used to set the Contact policy suppression Time-to-live (TTL) changed from SuppressForDays to SuppressionDuration in the ProcessInteractionHistory dataflow.  NBA  implementations on CDH version 8.6 or earlier have a generated ProcessSuppressions dataflow in the implementation Artifacts ruleset which causes the regeneration of the ProcessInteractionHistory dataflow to fail in the 24.1 update.  This failure is caused by the fact that the template dataflow for generating the ProcessInteractionHistory dataflow is also named ProcessSuppressions.

Steps to Validate:

1. Your system is configured with Contact policies in CDH version 8.6 or earlier and updated to CDH 24.1 release without HFIX-B2261 being applied prior to update.
2. Open the ProcessInteractionHistory dataflow and view the properties of the Convert shape for PegaMKT-Data-ActionInsights shape.
3. The TTL set property should map to .SuppressionDuration if successfully updated. Otherwise, it will contain .SuppressForDays property.

The following steps allow a runtime test of this issue:

4. Identify a Contact policy and its Outcome, threshold and number of days to suppress.
5. Using Customer Profile Viewer (CPV) lookup a customer or use a Persona for a sample customer record to test the Contact policy.
6. In the Next-Best-Action tab, specify the direction, channel and issue/group or Container and click the Make decision button.
7. Select an Action from the decision results grid and capture a response for the action which will exceed the Contact policy threshold.
8. Switch to the Overview tab in CPV and review the Contact policy suppression record just created and notice the time remaining as “--”

Resolution:

HFIX-B2261 must be applied prior to the Next-Best-Action Designer 24.1 update running.  If the hotfix is applied after the update has completed, the following manual steps must be taken:

• Open "ProcessInteractionHistory" data flow from the {Application} -Rules ruleset.
• Modify the convert shape of "PegaMKT-Data-ActionInsights" and set the TTL value with below property ".SuppressionDuration".

This will only fix future Contact policy suppressions.  Existing suppressions can be fixed with the help of Global Client Support.  If you are impacted by this issue, please raise a Support ticket with Global Client Support in My Support Portal for assistance.

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