---
title: What is Contact policy?
url: https://markin.ai/glossary/contact-policy
category: Decisioning and next best action
aliases: Frequency capping, Contact fatigue
---

# Contact policy

> Contact policy governs how often, through which channels and with what spacing a customer may be contacted. Expressed as caps and cool-downs, it is a constraint on the optimiser and protects the long-term value of attention against short-term campaign pressure.

## Why it matters for ARPU

Attention is a depleting asset. Policies that look like a brake on volume usually raise ARPU, because response rates hold instead of decaying across the year.

## Related terms

- [Arbitration](https://markin.ai/glossary/arbitration), Arbitration is the step that resolves competing candidate actions for the same customer into one decision, ranking them by expected value under constraints such as contact limits, budget, fairness and business priority.
- [Guardrail metric](https://markin.ai/glossary/guardrail-metric), A guardrail metric is a measure an experiment must not damage even if the primary metric improves: unsubscribe rate, complaint volume, margin, support contacts, app uninstalls.
- [Next best offer](https://markin.ai/glossary/next-best-offer), Next best offer selects the most valuable commercial proposition for a customer: which product, plan, bundle or price to present.
- [Decision volume](https://markin.ai/glossary/decision-volume), Decision volume is the number of distinct, evidenced customer-level decisions a business makes in a period.

## Go deeper

- [From campaign calendars to continuous decisioning](https://markin.ai/blog/campaign-calendars-to-continuous-decisioning), Volume versus value.
- [Customer decisioning](https://markin.ai/solutions/customer-decisioning), Caps as first-class constraints.

Source: https://markin.ai/glossary/contact-policy