Too many contact attempts over a short period of time can have a negative impact on a customer's willingness to further interact with your actions. They can also be non-compliant with corporate or regulatory guidelines. To prevent that, you can specify the following constraints for contacting your customers:

• Customer contact limits - Limit the number of interactions which a customer can receive over a given period of time on a specific channel. For example, you can decide that you do not want your customers to receive more than two emails per week.
• Contact policy library - Define suppressions, that is, automatically put an action on hold after a specific number of outcomes are recorded for some or all channels. For example, a contact policy can suppress an action for a particular customer after the customer has seen an ad for that action for five times. Suppressing or pausing an action prevents oversaturation by limiting the number of times that a customer is exposed to the same action.

1. In the Pega Customer Decision Hub portal, click Next-Best-ActionDesignerConstraints.
2. Click Edit.
3. Optional: To set the customer contact limit, in the Customer contact limits section, click Edit customer contact policy.
   Note: Pega Customer Decision Hub has a predefined Customer Contact Policy which sets the customer contact limits to one email and one SMS per week. Edit the policy to configure the channels, contact limits, duration, and the policy start and end date. For more information, see Controlling the number of customer contacts with contact policies.
4. Optional: To specify action suppressions, in the Contact policy library section, click + Add contact policy.
5. Optional: Enter the policy name.
6. In the Scope section, select the type of outcome which is tracked by the policy. For example, if the suppression should activate after a specific number of negative responses, select Track Rejects.
7. Specify whether to track responses individually for each action or for all actions in the group.
   Note: If you track outcomes for all actions in the group, then all of these actions are paused once the suppression criteria are met.
8. Select the time period over to track the responses.
   By default, Pega Customer Decision Hub tracks responses over a period of 7 or 30 days. To add more tracking periods:
   1. In Dev Studio, click ConfigureDecisioningDecisionsData SourcesInteraction History Summaries.
   2. Edit the Interaction History rule Action Outcomes for the past 7 Days or Action Outcomes for the past 30 Days.
   3. Save a copy of the rule into your data set and adjust the time period as required.
9. Click Submit.
   Result: The suppression configuration appears in the Contact policy library section.
10. Enter the number of responses required to fulfill the suppression criteria, for example, 30.
11. Select the channel for which you want to track the responses, for example, All.
12. Enter the number of days for which an action should be paused after the suppression criteria are met, for example, 5.
    For example: An example suppression is If there are 30 Rejects for All treatments, suppress the action for 5 days.
13. Optional: To add more suppression conditions, click + Add suppression.
    Note: Suppression conditions defined under the same contact policy track the same outcomes over the same period of time. They can, however, monitor different channels and have different outcome limits for each channel.
14. Optional: To track different metrics over different periods of time, click + Add contact policy.
    Note: For more information on adding additional tracking periods, see Adding more tracking time periods for contact policies.
15. Click Save.
16. To apply a contact policy to your Next-Best-Action Strategy, select it in the Engagement policy tab of Next-Best-Action Designer:
    1. In the Pega Customer Decision Hub portal, click Next-Best-ActionDesignerEngagement policy.
    2. Click the name of a group.
    3. Click Edit.
    4. In the Contact policy section, click the Configure icon.
    5. In the Configure contact policy window, select your new contact policy and click Add.
    6. Click Apply.
    7. Click Save.