Start using Next-Best-Action by defining the structure of issues and groups that make up the focus areas of your business.

When implementing Next-Best-Action, establishing the correct hierarchy is critically important. Review the information in the following topics to help you understand and implement the right business structure for your application.

Understanding issues and groups

In Pega Marketing, issues are different areas of focus for your business. An issue is the purpose behind the actions you offer to your customers. For example, actions with the purpose of retaining existing customers belong to the issue of Retention. Actions with the purpose of acquiring new customers belong to the issue of Acquisition.

Groups organize actions into logical buckets. For example, as part of the issue of Acquisition, you can create groups for products like Credit Cards, Mortgages, or Personal Loans.

Together, issues and groups form the organizing structure for your customer interactions. Each action you prepare for your customers is associated with an issue and a group. Because of that, you must always define the hierarchy before creating actions.

To speed up and simplify the process of implementing Next-Best-Action, Pega provides predefined templates that contain Next-Best-Action settings commonly used by organizations in the Communications and Financial Services industries.

Importing Next-Best-Action settings from a template

Pega provides industry-specific templates with the recommended business structure, engagement policy, arbitration, and channel settings for the Communications and Financial Services industries. You can import these templates to quickly set up the basic settings for your organization. In addition to the predefined templates, you can save your own Next-Best-Action settings as a template and them import the template into a different Pega Marketing instance, for example, to transfer the settings from a stage to a production environment.

1. On Pega Marketplace, search for and download NBA templates, including the out-of-the-box Communications and Financial Services templates, as well as any additional templates shared by Pega users.
   Templates developed for a specific industry may require certain artifacts to exist in your application. For example, a template created for Pega Marketing for Financial Services assumes that your primary context class is PegaCRM-Data-Customer-FS rather than PegaMKT-Data-Customer. Ensure that you use templates applicable to your industry, or import the relevant artifacts into your application before you select the Next-Best-Action template.
2. In the Pega Marketing portal, click Next-Best-Action > Designer.
3. Do one of the following actions:
   • If you did not already configure Next-Best-Action settings, select the template that you downloaded from Pega Marketplace.
   • If you previously configured or imported Next-Best-Action settings, you can change the template by clicking Taxonomy > Actions > Switch template.
     Important: The template change overwrites any settings that you previously configured.
4. Review the imported settings and adjust them manually as needed.
5. Optional: To save your template settings to a local file, for example, to import them into a production environment after staging tests, click Taxonomy > Actions > Save template.