The Fee Inquiry Microjourney™supports inquiries about both why a fee has been charged, as well as whether a fee can be waived. This microjourney leverages Pega Knowledge Management to provide the details about the fee and Pega Customer Decision Hub™(CDH) engine to automatically receive a decision whether the fee should be waived unconditionally, with conditions, or not at all. The microjourney supports scenarios that are entirely end-to-end self-service, self-service with escalation to a customer support representative, and call center. 

These topics describe how to configure and extend the Fee Inquiry Microjourney, which is part of the Pega Customer Service™ for Financial Services application. If you implemented a fee waiver decision management process, this microjourney also applies Pega Customer Decision Hub™ (CDH) or Pega Marketing™ for Financial Services. Note that CDH is required only for a model-driven process, and not for a simple rule-based process.

• Business value
• Required applications
• Personas, channels and use cases
• Example 1: Conditional fee waiver
• Example 2: Unconditional fee waiver
• Stages and steps
• Data model
• Enabling the Microjourney
• FAQs

Business value

Bank fees are common, confusing, and often a frustration for customers; they are also a necessary part of a bank’s business model for revenue and enforcement of good financial management. This microjourney enables banks to automate most interactions through a self-service channel, but route to an agent where a fee waiver is conditional or certain attributes of the customer warrant human interaction. As a result, your organization can benefit from greater overall efficiency and engagement.

Required applications

You need some or all of these applications to implement this microjourney. 

• Pega Customer Service™  for Financial Services 8.4 (required)
• Pega Customer Decision Hub™ or Pega Marketing™ for Financial Services 
  • For simple rule-based decision management CDH is not required.
  • To implement model-driven fee waiver decision management, CDH is required.

Personas, channels and use cases

The following table shows the personas and channels for each use case in this microjourney.

Example 1: Conditional fee waiver

In the first example, Joseph Miller is a customer who has had financial challenges and missed payments before. He has already had one late fee rebated as the first-time offense in less than 6 months of time. He gets a late fee charged again and decides to ask for fee waiver. 

1. Joseph goes into his online banking portal and sees a proactive prompt reminding of his payment due as shown below.

2. Joseph decides to make a payment and so clicks on Yes. The chatbot asks him the amount he wishes to pay. Instead of answering the question, he decides to ask for waiver of a recent late fee.

3. The bot passes the request to CDH which determines that a conditional waiver is possible. In this case, the bot recommends transferring Joseph to a live chat agent, which he accepts.

4. The experience is seamless for Joseph, and the CSR can see the transcript of what led up to the transfer. The agent can then explain the condition required for the waiver (that is, Joseph must pay down his balance to 90% of the credit limit), and Joseph accepts the offer.

5. The CSR sees a next best action to recommend AutoPay as a means of avoiding late fees in the future. 

Example 2: Unconditional fee waiver

In the second scenario, Emily Foster has also missed a payment due date, but she is a first-time offender and has a very high potential lifetime value. When she asks for a fee waiver, CDH determines that she is high value enough to make it worth waiving the fee without any conditions or escalation to a live agent. A confirmation notification is sent once the fee is refunded. 

The following figure shows Emily’s conversation with the chatbot.

Stages and steps

The project team can modify and extend this microjourney in App Studio, allowing business users to Build for Change™. This screen capture shows the stages and steps in the microjourney. The figure shows the following three stages of the case flow:

1. Intake inquiry  – Identifies the fee and captures the request for a fee waiver.
2. Process inquiry – Checks the eligibility of a customer and processes the fee waiver request.
3. Resolution – Sends out the confirmation to the customer.

Data model

The Data model tab of the Fee Inquiry case type displays the data objects that are used.

Enabling the microjourney

The out-of-the-box Fee Inquiry case type is designed and implemented to address credit card late fees, but you can extend the case to support other fee types and account types.  

At a minimum, this microjourney requires implementation of the D_FeeDetails data page to get the list of fee transactions. Other common extension points are described in FAQs section of this document.

To get list of fee transactions for specific account or for a specific fee type, extend the D_FeeDetails data page (which is marked as an extension), and then modify the data page to pull the necessary data from an appropriate data source.

FAQs

What are the common extension points?

This section describes extension points to modify waiver eligibility, notifications, and service-level agreements (SLA) for conditional payment.

1. Reason for inquiry - by default, you can use the following types of inquiry: "Fee explanation" or "Request for fee waiver." If you want to add options to this list, extend the ReasonForInquiry property or add field values for the ReasonForInquiry field in the PegaFS-SCM-Work-FeeInquiry class. 

2. You can extend the CalculateFeeDetails data transform to modify the logic to calculate credit utilization (the percentage of credit limit spent), determine how long ago a late fee was waived if there were prior waivers, and payment amount required in case of conditional approval of fee waiver. These calculations are helpful in making the decisions regarding whether the fee can be waived.

3. Extend the FeeWaiverEligibilityCheck decision table to customize the logic to determine if the customer is eligible for fee waiver. By default, this logic is based on credit utilization and how long ago a late fee was waived if there were prior waivers.

4. Alternatively, if you are licensed for CDH or Pega Marketing for Financial Services, you can use more complex model-driven strategy to determine a customer’s eligibility for a fee waiver. Pega Marketing for Financial Services ships the NBA_Service_ProactiveActions strategy (shown in the following figure) as a sample.

5. You can extend the SetFeeWaiverSLA data transform to update the fee waiver goal and deadline for routing the Fee Inquiry case into the Fee Waiver Requests work basket for further processing by a back office worker. This is also the time given to customers to make the necessary payments in case of conditional approval of their fee waiver requests.

6. You can extend the FeeInqSOR activity to update any system of record once it has been determined to waive the fee.

7. You can extend the SetCorrespondence data transform to set specific correspondences based on the conditions.

8. Extend the ProcessFeeWaiverRequest flow to automate the processing of fee waiver requests. By default, this flow works as follows.

• If the fee waiver has been approved unconditionally, then the IsFeeWaived property is set to true in the SetFeeWaivedValue data transform and the fee is waived with no human involved.
• Else if there is a conditional approval, the customer is expected to make a payment (see extension point 2 in this list) within a specific time that is set in the SetFeeWaiverSLA data transform (see extension point 5 in this list).
  • The fee waiver request is routed to the Fee Waiver Requests work basket for further processing by a back office worker.
  • The back office worker needs to check and update if the payment has been received.
  • If the back office worker updates that the payment has been received, then the IsFeeWaived property is set to true in the SetFeeWaivedValue data transform and the fee is waived.