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Context and Attributes

Zuora

Context and Attributes

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Adaptive Context is the dynamic foundation that enables your product catalogue and pricing logic to respond intelligently to real-world conditions. It acts as a decision layer that synthesizes real-time signals from across your ecosystem, such as your billing data, CRM, customer activity, and product configurations, and translates those signals into immediate business actions. Adaptive Context dynamically controls:

  • What products are shown to whom
  • Which pricing rules apply
  • When specific features or promotions are activated

Instead of creating multiple product versions or hardcoding business logic, you can dynamically shape your offerings using a consistent set of context attributes.

Defining context attributes

The Context & Attributes screen is where you define these attributes. Once created, they can be used across:

  • Dynamic Pricing
  • Promotions and Offers
  • Real-time Personalization
  • Product Catalogue targeting

By defining context attributes, you can:

  • Capture data from sessions, users, or external sources
  • Enable real-time evaluation of conditions during API calls or UI rendering
  • Power conditional logic in Business Context Rules (like Promotions, Pricing Plans, Merchandising).

Together, these capabilities transform your Product Catalogue into an intelligent control layer for packaging, pricing, and merchandising strategies.

Why context matters?

In today’s dynamic commerce environments, your product and pricing logic can’t be static. Customer behaviour, usage patterns, geography, and subscription lifecycle stages all influence what constitutes an ideal offer. Adaptive Context bridges these signals and your monetization engine by:

  • Unifying diverse data sources (Zuora, CRM, web apps, external APIs)
  • Enabling hyper-personalized experiences at scale without custom code
  • Reducing operational overhead from managing multiple product versions
  • Allowing rapid experimentation through conditional rules and real-time evaluation

What attributes do?

Context Attributes are the building blocks of Adaptive Context. They represent data points that can be referenced in dynamic rules, API responses, or UI rendering logic. Attributes may come from:

  • Zuora objects, for example, Account, Subscription, Product Rate Plan
  • Custom objects, for example, customer metadata, usage summaries
  • External systems, for example, CRM, marketing platform, or user sessions

By defining attributes once, you can reuse them across Business Context Rules, ensuring consistency and agility in the execution of pricing and packaging decisions.

Example scenario

A streaming service uses Adaptive Context to personalize subscription offers.

  • Attribute: Customer_Tenure (number of months since signup)
  • Rule: If Customer_Tenure ≥ 12 and Subscription_Plan = "Basic", offer a 20% discount on the "Premium" plan.
  • Result: When an eligible customer logs in, the API applies the rule in real time, and the UI displays the upgrade offer with the discounted price.

This eliminates the need to create separate product entries for every customer type, while still delivering targeted, relevant offers instantly.