How to Test Trigger Strategies in Pega: A Step-by-Step Guide

In the Pega Customer Decision Hub (CDH), trigger strategies play a crucial role in initiating customer engagement actions. Properly testing these strategies is essential to ensure they align with defined engagement policies and deliver expected results. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of how to set up and run tests on your trigger strategies, including how to define and apply Personas that emulate real customer attributes for a more accurate testing environment.

What Are Trigger Strategies?

Trigger strategies are referenced by data flows that the channel services invoke in Pega. These strategies determine how, when, and where engagement actions should be triggered based on customer data and engagement policies. By running tests on trigger strategies, you can pinpoint areas where actions might be unexpectedly dropping out or identify components that are not performing as expected.

Preparation: Setting Up the Persona Data Transform

Before testing, you need to set up a Persona Data Transform. This Data Transform is automatically generated based on your Context Dictionary and includes the following pages: EventPayload Page: Contains event-specific data about the customer.

Customer Page: Holds primary customer details.

Additional Pages: Based on your context dictionary setup, other Pages may be present or can be added as needed.

Each of these pages represents a piece of contextual data from the dictionary, and you can add properties as necessary to test against your engagement policy criteria.

Save the Persona Data Transform into your implementation layer to create as many Personas as you need to test your strategies.

Testing the Trigger Strategy

1. In the Pega Customer Decision Hub portal, click Intelligence > Strategies.

2. Open the Trigger_NBA_TopLevel strategy.

3. Open the Test Run panel by clicking the slider button on the upper right side of the strategy canvas.

4. In the Settings section, select Data Transform, and then select a Persona, as in the following figure.

Selecting a customer Persona for strategy testing

5. In the Value field, next to the Channel Context, enter the name of your channel context.

6. Click the Target icon next to your chosen Persona.

7. On the Definition tab of the Data Transform, specify the characteristics of the Persona. The Persona characteristics are defined as properties of the customer, EventPayLaod, and other related data.

For example: If you have a specific test customer contact that you want to use as a test Persona, find the Set Action for the target .CustID and enter the value into the Source box. You can add new properties by right-clicking on a row (not in the Target or Source boxes) and selecting Add child.

8. Save the Data Transform (or click Save As to create a new version) and switch back to your trigger strategy.

9. Click Run, and then select the Results component to view the strategy results.

What to do next:

To find the strategy component that is not performing as expected, you can click through each shape on the strategy canvas and identify if and where actions are dropping out or where the strategy results are unexpected.