Timeline view of customer events
Pega applications track customer activities and display the activities in a Customer timeline view on the customer composite. This section is included by default on some composite tabs, and can be added to others.
Timeline source
By default, the customer timeline pulls events from the Pega Customer Service work tables, which include only customer service events. When using work tables as the source of events, you must override the report definition in your implementation application to point to the work tables for your implementation layer.
If you have a Decisioning license and you enable that feature, then the customer timeline pulls events from the Apache® Cassandra® data store. When using the CRM suite of applications, the Cassandra data store includes sales automation and marketing events, as well as customer service events.
For more information about configuring the customer timeline, see the Pega Customer Service Implementation Guide on the Pega Customer Service product page.
Tracked activities
In Pega Customer Service applications, the following customer activities are tracked automatically:
- All interaction types across all channels
- All service case types
In Pega Sales automation applications, the following customer activities are tracked automatically:
- Creation of a customer, appointment, lead, opportunity, or task service case
- Email receipt
- Opportunity loss or win
In Pega Customer Decision Hub, offer-related activities are tracked automatically.
Timeline widgets
The customer composite provides two timeline widgets to display customer activities.
- The Customer Journey widget is the default view of customer events. Operators can filter the timeline by application and can click an event to view details.
- The legacy Customer Movie widget is still available for use by customers who prefer that widget. Administrators can disable the Customer Journey widget and enable the Customer Movie widget. The Customer Movie widget does not provide a detailed view of each event.
Applications enabled for decision-management track customer activities as event type records that can be retrieved at a later time. The events are stored in the Event Store data set. You can retrieve the data from the event store data set for an individual customer or a group of customers. The application also tracks interaction history data from Pega Customer Decision Hub.
Many events are tracked automatically, but administrators can create new event types to track additional activities.
Customer event tracking in your application
To capture customer events in your application, enable decisioning services.
If Decision Strategy Manager is deployed in the application server, then create nodes in the decisioning landing pages (). For more information, see Decision Strategy Manager (DSM) - landing page.
Add the nodes to the decisioning landing pages. By default, each added node has a status of NORMAL. For more information on decision nodes, see About decision data nodes. If Pega Customer Decision Hub is deployed and nodes are not added or if Pega Customer Decision Hub is not deployed, then customer events are not captured and the timeline widget is empty.
Configuring the customer timeline
The Customer journey widget, on the customer composite, displays the most common customer activities in a customer timeline view. Configure the events source for the customer timeline, and configure additional events to track, if required.
By default, the customer timeline pulls events from the Pega Customer Service work tables, which include only customer service events. If that is the source that you want to use for the customer timeline, select the events work table for your application.
If you have a license for Decisioning and you enable that feature, then the customer timeline pulls events from the Apache Cassandra data store, which includes customer service, sales automation, and marketing events.
Changing the timeline widget
The default timeline widget is the Customer Journey widget. To use the legacy Customer movie widget instead, complete the following steps:
- In Dev Studio, search for and select the CSTimelineSettings data transform rule.
- Save a copy of the rule.
- Change the value of the .EnableTimelineControl setting from true to false.
- Save the changes.
Selecting the events work table
If you want the customer timeline to pull events from the work tables, you must overwrite the out-of-the-box report definition in order to select the correct work tables for your implementation application.
- Log in to your implementation application as an administrator.
- In the header of Dev Studio, search for and open the LoadWorkObjectsbyContact report definition, in the PegaCA-Work ruleset.
- Click Save as.
- In the Apply to (class) field, enter the class to use as the source for the customer timeline events.
- In the Add to ruleset field, select the ruleset that contains the customer timeline events.
- Save the rule in your implementation layer.
Configuring customer events to track
Pega applications automatically track the most common customer activities and display the activities chronologically in the Customer journey widget on the customer composite. To track an additional activity, create an event for the activity.
For information about how to configure a new event type to track, see "Creating new event types," next.
- Determine whether there are customer events that you want to track that are not tracked by default. To view a list of event types that are always tracked, see "Tracked activities," earlier.
- For each new event that you want to track, determine the source of the event, the source of the customer ID, and the storage and retrieval options.
Creating new event types
To track customer activities that are not tracked by default so you can view those events in timeline widgets, complete the following steps:
- Click .
- Click New, and then click Create.
- Follow the wizard instructions to run the Create New Event Type wizard, as described in Creating an event type in the Event Catalog. The wizard creates a data flow that captures the customer data and stores it in the repository.
- Open the newly created dataflow and update it per your requirements to capture the events. For example, see the ServiceCaseCMF and InteractionCMF data flows.
- To capture an event, call the CaptureEvent flow from your case flow. This
CaptureEvent flow calls the CaptureEvent activity to run your data flow.This step is required only if you are using the Customer movie widget; it is not required if you are using the Customer Journey widget.
- To map the appropriate properties, override the EventDetails data transform rule in your case. For example, if your case type is Complaint or Compliment, override the EventDetails data transform in PegaCA-Work-Complaint class.
- Override the DefineEventDataFlow activity in your case and call the data flow that you created earlier in this procedure.
- Save all of your changes.
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