One of the main goals of bundling actions for outbound delivery is to avoid "spamming" individuals in on-line channels such as email, where without bundling, if multiple actions were selected for a contact, each would result in a separate email being sent.

Automatic bundling allows such multiple actions (for a single contact) to be combined into a single communication containing a predefined bundle "parent", and then each of the actions become bundle "members". However, from a Next-Best-Action Designer perspective, each bundle parent and member is output as a separate record, so a bundle including 3 bundle members would be output as 4 records, one for the parent and one for each member; action flow and treatment template processing provide the mechanism to output the bundle as a single unit.

Output Bundling Concepts

The Output Bundling Settings DDR and some bundling-related concepts are described below.

Intended Recipient

This is set under the Engagement policy tab on the action rule and is stored as the CommunicateTo property on the action. It determines to which contact or contacts an action will be delivered in a multilevel context dictionary configuration. If the configuration is not multilevel, this property will not be available.

There are three possible values:

• Eligible contact (CommunicateTo= YieldToOriginal) - deliver the action to the contact for whom it was originally assigned, that is, the one for whom the action passed the engagement policy rules. This is the default setting if CommunicateTo has not otherwise been set.
• Redirect to primary contact (CommunicateTo= YieldToPrimary) - deliver only to a primary contact, that is, one who is an authorized contact on the account. If the original contact is not already a primary contact the action will be redirected. An example could be for a family mobile phone plan where a child's phone is eligible for an upgrade, but the action should be sent to the parent and not the child.
• Eligible contact and copy to primary contact (CommunicateTo= YieldToAll) - deliver to the originally assigned contact and to a primary contact if the original contact is not already a primary contact. An example could be for a family mobile phone plan where a child's data usage is approaching the line limit, so the action should be sent to the parent as well as the child.

Deliver Offline

This refers to whether the outbound treatment will deliver to an offline medium such as a database table or file or whether the treatment delivers to a live channel. The setting is held in the pyDeliverOffline property which is true for offline delivery, or otherwise false. It is automatically set (to true or false) within the NBA Designer Framework based on the treatment definition, and separate bundle settings can be defined for each of these settings.

Output Bundling Settings DDR