Decisioning & Next Best Action
A centralized brain for your best marketing
Decisioning can mean a lot of things to different people, but it means nothing to even more. Decisioning is not a brand new concept, but it does come from fairly niche software platforms. Due to the backend nature of these platforms it’s unlikely that you’ve run into them unless you’ve worked directly with them at your business or you specialize in the marketing technology space. The scope and sophistication of those platforms makes it unlikely for those who aren’t at quite large companies to have utilized them to this point. That said, like most marketing technology over the last couple decades, it won’t be this way for long. Increased competition, scalable cloud solutions, and plug and play integration developments will make decisioning platforms accessible to more and more businesses. If I had to explain decisioning platforms in a sentence it would go something like this: Decisioning platforms connect all of the areas where you interact with your customers and use that unified view to manage customer interactions under a centralized framework in order to optimize them at a 1-to-1 level… I expect that doesn’t clear a whole lot up for you, don’t worry because we don’t have to settle for one sentence.
Decisioning platforms do just what it sounds like, make decisions. Dedicated decisioning platforms may reference a vast range of marketing decisions as within their sphere. These could range everywhere from relatively simple website personalization to complex decisions like which offer(s) a rep should present to a frustrated customer in a retention scenario. Some broader marketing platforms refer to decisioning as a smaller piece of the puzzle (usually isolating the more complex decisions) and treat items like website personalization and optimization separately. I’m not overly concerned with drawing a distinction here, I think the most important characteristic comes down to the logical framework for optimizing the decisions within the platform. In addition to that logical framework the technological features of these platforms are central to their usefulness. To be effective they must efficiently operate across channels, front end marketing systems, and existing data sources. That said, I’m not a system developer, and this blog isn’t really for the most technical among us, so I’ll stick to the marketing and optimization aspects for this post.
Central to a good decisioning system is the concept of Next Best Action (NBA). Like it sounds, Next Best Action is all about picking the optimal action to perform for a given customer interaction. A good framework for thinking about NBA selection is the following process flow:
The applicable actions can vary pretty drastically based on the context of the interaction you are trying to optimize, but this same framework can be applied in order to make a 1-to-1 decision across those use cases. We’ll dive into suggestions for designing an NBA strategy in future posts, but to wrap up this preliminary look I’ll outline a few examples. I’ll use a consumer bank to show a few different areas where the same decisioning engine and NBA framework can be leveraged to optimize their customer interactions in different channels.
Presenting personalized offers on account login
Everyone is familiar with logging into their online bank account and being presented with a new offer for a credit card, specialty savings account, or new line of credit. This is a great example of where an NBA strategy processed by a decisioning engine can be the driver of those actions (and often is). In the short period your account is loading the website asks the decisioning engine what offers/messages to present, based on your individual account situation and what your behavior indicates the decisioning engine will identify the optimal offers to present.
Optimizing customer service interactions in a call center
This same bank may also use their decisioning platform to help the customer service channel identify the next best action to take during a customer call. This decisioning engine may be called at multiple points within an interaction to take the context of the customer call as well as the customer data available across all channels in order to identify resolutions or offers optimal to present. A customer calling about too low of a credit limit may result in the system providing the service rep with one of the below actions based on which would generate the most expected value according to the customers probability to respond positively and the value it would generate for the business.
- Offer a limit increase to $X on existing card.
- Offer the customer a new specialty credit card.
- Prompt the service rep to discuss what goes into determining credit limits along with some recommendations tailored to that customers credit profile.
Managing a campaign for customers who missed a payment
When, where, and with what content is it best to reach out for each customer situation? Decisioning and NBA are an inherently reactionary process, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be leveraged to evaluate and identify opportunities for proactive marketing actions. Outbound actions are reactions to circumstances and events that can be optimized under the same general framework as any other customer interaction. In this example it may be as simple as a daily trigger to evaluate customers with accounts in arrears and identify the best action to take. Message copy, message timing, channel, even whether you should send a message at all yet can all be decided for each unique circumstance. That decision could be optimized based on the probability of receiving a payment as soon as possible or to optimize the long term value of that customer, depending on business goals.
Implementing a centralized decisioning solution can be a large task, but not without benefit. A solution with a solid NBA selection strategy and good execution may not mean you can take over the world, but it can deliver huge value for your business. If you’re interested in reading more about the topic stick around, I can’t wait to dive deeper into strategic components in future posts. Follow me here and connect with me on LinkedIn so you don’t miss a thing. If you think a decisioning solution is the next step in your company’s marketing evolution, but aren’t sure where to start reach out on LinkedIn or in the comments below.
Ready to dive into that Next Best Action process at a deeper level? Check out this post on just that.
