Overview

A Reward Function defines which user actions count as good outcomes (positive signals) and which count as bad outcomes (negative signals).

Without a shared Reward Function, you would have to define "what counts as success" separately inside every agent, and there'd be nothing stopping two agents from quietly defining the same goal in two slightly different ways, which makes it harder for the underlying model to learn cleanly from your account's full engagement history.

A Reward Function reduces that redundancy: you do not need to redefine your business goal for every agent you set up. Reward Functions are independent of any single agent. You create a Reward Function once for your account, and any agent that needs one, a One-Time Agent or a Lifecycle Agent, selects it from a list.

How agents use a Reward Function

When you create an agent, you select a Reward Function in the Goals step. The agent works toward the positive signals in that Reward Function.

• Campaign Decisioning: When several campaigns compete for the same user, the agent scores each campaign by how likely it is to lead to your positive signals for that user. It delivers the highest-scoring campaign within your message limits.
• Variant Decisioning: For a campaign that uses the Optimal variant message type, the agent scores each variant in the same way. Each user receives the variant that scores highest for them.

An agent of type Both uses the same Reward Function for both.

Types of Reward Functions

CleverTap provides System and Custom Reward Functions. Every account starts with two ready-made System Reward Functions you can use immediately.

• Use a System Reward Function when your goal is simple, optimizing raw notification clicks, or a single conversion event.
• Create a Custom Reward Function when your business goal spans multiple funnel stages, needs negative signals beyond the built-in ones, or uses event names specific to your industry.

System Reward Functions

These come with every account and need no setup. Their name, description, and overall structure are locked and cannot be changed.

Custom Reward Function

A Custom Reward Function is fully editable and lets you tailor signals to your business's funnel.

To create a Custom Reward Function:

1. From the CleverTap dashboard, navigate to Decisioning > Reward Function, and then click Create. The Create Reward Function section appears.

2. Enter a name in the Function Name field. Names can be up to 200 characters and must be unique in your account.

3. Enter a Description, up to 500 characters, explaining the business goal this Reward Function optimizes for. For example, a retailer might name theirs Maximize Purchases, described as: "Optimizes for users completing a purchase. Penalizes channel unsubscribes to reduce communication fatigue."

4. Under Positive Signals, add at least one positive signal, which is a user action you want the agent to optimize toward.

   1. Click Add Positive Signal to add a signal. Each signal you add is its own priority level; drag a signal using its handle to reorder priority, the topmost signal is Priority 1, the highest.

   2. Click + Next to a signal to add another event to it. Any one event within a signal satisfies that priority level, events within a signal are evaluated as OR, not AND.

      For example:

5. Under Negative Signals, optionally add signal(s) that may adversely affect conversion. Click Add Negative Signal, following the same pattern as positive signals.
6. Click Save.

View and Filter Reward Functions

The Reward Function page lists every Reward Function in your account.

Use Filters to narrow the list:

• Time Period: filter by when the Reward Function was created. Defaults to All time.
• Created By: filter by the user who created it.
• Type: filter by System or Custom.