How Xanatek's "Pending Transaction turn on" setting may cause faulty triggers when Policies are renewed (and what to do about it)
Have you noticed some inaccurate event triggers in Fuse at the time of policy renewals? This may be related to a specific configuration setting in Xanatek IMS. Read on to learn what it is and how to resolve it.
What is causing this?
IMS has an optional configuration setting called "Pending Transaction turn on." When enabled, any policy renewal data entered in IMS or downloaded from a carrier to IMS before the policy's renewal date will not be applied to the policy until the renewal date is reached.
This setting has some useful applications in IMS. At the same time, it can sometimes lead to unexpected issues in Fuse.
How it affects policies in Fuse
Policy renewal data that has not yet been applied to a policy in IMS will also not be sent to Fuse via integration. As a result, Fuse does not know the policy is scheduled to renew until after the renewal date is reached, at which time Xanatek applies the new effective and expiration dates and then sends them to Fuse at the next scheduled sync time.
A potential problem is that Xanatek's daily data sync with Fuse may not occur until later in the day (sync times are typically scheduled to happen in the evening), meaning that Fuse may not receive the renewal data until most of the day has passed.
By then, Fuse's automation will have already detected that the policy has reached its expiration date and, as a result, will have changed its status to "Lost." If this occurs with all of a customer's active policies at once, the customer's overall status will also have been changed to "Lost."
These status changes, in turn, can lead to the customer being added into or removed from campaigns that relate to their policy or account status. The real-world impact depends on what campaigns you are running. For example, it might cause them to be removed from customer-related campaigns like Newsletters or Account Reviews and added to Lost Policy and/or Lost Customer campaigns.
How to avoid the issue
The failsafe way to avoid these potential misfires is to disable the "Pending Transaction turn on" setting in Xanatek IMS. This allows Fuse to get the policy renewal data before the policy's expiration date, which means that Fuse will not mistakenly change the policy's status to "Lost."
However...
What to do if you need to keep this setting in IMS
If you find the "Pending Transaction turn on" setting useful in IMS for other reasons and decide to leave it enabled, here's how to work around it:
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Be aware that Policies that renew will sometimes appear on their renewal date to become lost and then active again within roughly one day. As a result, on any given customer record in Fuse, you may see more account activities than expected related to lost and then quickly renewed policies or accounts. For example:
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To account for this potential gap:
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Ensure all campaigns targeting active customers are configured to allow removed accounts to be re-added.
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Ensure all campaigns targeting active policies are configured to allow removed policies to be re-added.
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Make sure all campaigns that target inactive accounts or that trigger based on the Lost Policy or Lost Customer events have a minimum 2-day delay before any email or other communication steps are triggered (this should allow enough time for Fuse to get the renewed policy data and therefore remove the subscriber from the campaign before any inaccurate communications are sent).
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Questions?
Please let us know if you'd like any additional help understanding this quirk and how to mitigate its impact. Our friendly team of support experts is here to help!