Understanding Rules

Introduction

It is crucial to apply business logic while generating customer communications. This ensures that every customer interaction is relevant, efficient, and aligned with the organization's goals. Applying a business logic also enables you to use customer data (such as customer profile, preferences, or demographics) to tailor communications, making them more effective. For example, you can decide to send a welcome letter to all new customers. Or while generating invoice for joint accounts, include only the primary account holder details.

Rules feature in Communication Cloud Service enables its business users to configure and maintain the business logic that improves the precision in their decision making. Using Rules, you can apply predefined conditions on customer data and then take appropriate course of actions based on the results. It also enables you to reuse the same business logic in multiple communications.

For example, you want to send your invoice documents to senior citizens in a bigger font size than usual for easy perusal. To enable this, you can configure a rule that applies to all customers of age above 60 to use a different Style configuration that includes a bigger Font size.

Benefits of Using Rules

Configuring Rules in Communication Cloud Service provides the following benefits:
  • It is easier for business users to configure and maintain the business logic as Rules.
  • Easier management of frequent changes in business logic or legislative laws.
  • You can reuse the same Rule, or a set of Rules across different communications.

Terms Used in Rule Configuration

Here are a few terms that you need to familiarize with before going ahead with rule configurations:
  • Rule Type: Each Rule is categorized by a Rule Type, that identifies the feature that consumes the Rule. Currently, there are two Rule Types: Communication and Digital Asset.
  • Rule Category: Every Rule created in Communication Cloud Service maps to a Rule Category. This enables you to group rules based on the Operations Company for which it is applicable.
  • Nested Rules: You can create complex rules by referring to other rules. This helps in maintaining changes to conditions, as well as allows you to reuse existing rules to build a new one.
  • Contextualized Rules: Rules are created generically and consumed by different modules within Communication Cloud Service. Additionally, you can create Contextualized Rules that are exclusively created and consumed by a specific feature, like Digital Asset. While creating a Digital Asset configuration, you can create Rules that include conditions based on which communications can be sorted, and stored or retrieved from different storage locations. For example, you can create a rule to store documents of customers in the US to a designated storage location. To know more about Digital Assets, see Understanding Digital Asset.
  • User Defined Data Structure: You can associate one or more User Defined Data Structures to a Rule. This enables you to use field values of the selected User Defined Data Structures as operands, while creating conditions within a rule.
  • Rule Statement: A Rule Statement is a collection of Conditions and their Result that constitutes the Rule. Every Rule version must include two or more Rule Statements and they are processed sequentially, until one of them returns a result.

Configuring Rules in Communication Cloud Service

To create a Rule in Communication Cloud Service, you need to complete the following configurations:

Note:

See Configuring a Rule before proceeding with creating a Rule configuration in Communication Cloud Service.

Configuration Movement of Rule

Rule configurations follow the configuration movement process; that is, if you configure a Rule in one tenancy (non-production), you can move the configuration to different tenancies (pre-production and production) sequentially using Configuration Movement. For more information, see Understanding Configuration Movement.