NBA for MBAs

Next Best Action (NBA) has demonstrable ROI

Next Best Action infrastructure can expand B2C sales,

1 improve customer loyalty, improve agent productivity,
and optimize back-end processes.

The core applications of Next Best Action are the

2
targeted offers that deliver value and tailored
CRM experiences that keep customers happy.

To maximize value and boost customer quality of

3 experience, you should continually tune the predictive
models and business rules that guide Next Best
Actions across all processes and touchpoints.
Agenda
Experience: Secret Sauce Behind CRM Success

CRM Next Best Action (NBA): Analytics Driving Value & Experience

Predictive models: The Analytical Heart of CRM NBA

Metrics of CRM NBA’s Business Impact

Case Studies of CRM NBA

Recommendations for CRM and BP professionals

Agenda
Experience: Secret Sauce Behind CRM Success

CRM Next Best Action (NBA): Analytics Driving Value & Experience

Predictive models: The Analytical Heart of CRM NBA

Metrics of CRM NBA’s Business Impact

Case Studies of CRM NBA

Recommendations for CRM and BP professionals

What truly drives your business?

Love Money
Your customers love the Your investors enjoy the return on their
experience and value you provide investment — and seek to deliver fresh
— and seek to deepen and extend value to new & existing customers.
the relationship.

Businesses exist to catch, keep, and grow customer

relationships
 Experience is strategic to CRM success

Experience = sum total of your interactions with customers

and the impression—golden or tarnished—that lingers.

What golden moments matter most to your customers?

How will you shape How will you

those moments infuse those
inside your business processes with
processes? trustworthy data?

April 2011 “Beyond CRM: Manage Customer Experiences”

Drive CRM Projects With An Outside-In CEM Approach

How will you monetize ROI from experience-boosting processes?

 Experiences make and break customer relationships
• Customer satisfaction is dynamic, fragile.
• Your staff may be barely aware that the
relationship hangs by a thread.
• Reasons for customer dissatisfaction often lie
buried in your data.
• CRM databases, call-center logs, email interactions,
business process exceptions, social media listening,
etc.
• Your most influential customers may be
spreading dissatisfaction far and wide on
social media.
Experience spreads through word-of-mouth.

April 2010 “Peer Influence Analysis”

Two Types Of Mass Influencers
Satisfying experience depends on agile engagement

Help. I can’t find the specific product I need on

your portal or in your stores.

I love it. I’d like to

We appreciate your loyalty. order it now.
point of sale We’re prepared to offer you Please ship it
a version tailored to your ASAP.
specific needs.

self-service
customer portal

call center
 Agenda
Experience: Secret Sauce Behind CRM Success
CRM Next Best Action (NBA): Analytics Driving Value & Experience
Predictive models: The Analytical Heart of CRM NBA
Metrics of CRM NBA’s Business Impact
Case Studies: Next Best Action in CRM
Recommendations for BP and CRM professionals
Q&A
Quality of experience thrives on proactive
guidance
Stuff they taught you Stuff that NBA will help
in MBA school your company accomplish

September 2010 “What Is The Right Customer Experience Strategy?”

Company Strategy Guides Expectations For A Customer Experience Strategy
Experiences: guided & tuned through Next Best
Action

Next Best Action

best practices for proactively
guiding and optimizing all offers,
interactions, and experiences
across all customer-facing
channels, processes, and roles
 Next Best Action: heart of agile CRM processes
You optimize customers’ quality of experience through every interaction across
the CRM lifecycle.

What’s the optimal offer, What’s the optimal

response, or other action that result that you can
you can offer at each step in achieve with each
each business process? guided action?
CRM
NBA Next Best
GUIDING Best PRODUCING business
process Actions outcomes
platform
Better
experiences
If you’re retaining customers & growing the relationship, Boosted
you are probably giving them worthwhile experiences! value
Experience shaped through every CRM NBA touchpoint
Better
experiences
• Identify customer
Sales • Qualify customer

Front office/CRM
• Onboard customer
• Retain customer
• Grow customer

CRM Marketing
•
relationship
Listen to customer
voice
NBA NEXT
BEST
• Resolve customer
issues
Service • Target customer
process ACTION offers

Back office/ERP, finance, etc.

GUIDANCE • Maximize campaign
lift
platform • Proactively resolve
issues

Fulfillment

Manufacturing

Boosted value
Drive experience optimization into CRM
operations
• CRM NBA show leverage experience-boosting
investments in:
• decision automation, sentiment analysis, conversation
management, dynamic case management, knowledge
management, and social networking
• Use NBA to:
Sales
• identify burning issues
• automatically escalate them, via dynamic case
management systems, to customer service reps who can
Marketing
respond to issues and defuse them before they become
showstoppers.
• The next best experience should be: Service
• the one you deliver to a customer who is delighted by your
apparently seamless ability to deliver continuous
satisfaction tailored to their precise needs and situation
 Next Best Action: experience optimization via
analytics
Recommendations,
db Predictive automated actions,
db analytics, scripted responses, Self-service

Front office/CRM
portals Sales
business rules, prompts, offers,
and dynamic portal Call center
orchestration personalization, &
models tailored online Email
Marketing
db experiences Telephony/IVR
POS
CRM, EDW, DA, BPM, Social media Service
BRMS, PA/DM, TA, BA, NEXT BEST

Back office/ERP, finance, etc.

db CEP, CM, KM, etc. ACTION
GUIDANCE
Recommendation Apps serving
db engines front office (call
center, customer Fulfillment
service, sales,
marketing
CRM NBA process platform campaign mgmt.,
db etc.) and back
office
EDW = enterprise data warehouse; DA = decision automation; BPM = business process management; BRMS = business rules management systems; Manufacturing
PA/DM = predictive analytics and data mining; TA = text analytics; BA= behavioral analytics; CEP = complex event processing, CM = conversation
management, KM = knowledge management
Core of Next Best Action: predicting what’s acceptable

We think you’ll love Not exactly my

product X. style.

You offered that

How about product Y, our
before. Money’s
very latest model?
tight. Still not sure.
call center
How about if we offer Y at
Well....OK....I’ll
50% markdown, with easy
take it then.
payment plan?

Predictive analytics models Business rules

leveraging data mining and statistical identifying the sales, revenue, profit,
analysis– guide you in recommending and other deterministic consequences
the offers that will prove most of various scenarios; guide you in
acceptable to customers under calculating which offers, if accepted,
various circumstances. offer the biggest CLV boost.

You can automate scripted presentation of offers by likely acceptability!

And deliver on your promises, link to back-end processes

 Guide customers with consistent cross-channel

experience
 Guide sales, marketing, and customer service to Help. I can’t find the specific
target recommended “next best offers” to customer product I need on your portal or
requirements in your stores.
 Guide order fulfillment, manufacturing, and other
back-end processes to satisfy the customer

I love it. I’d

like to order it
Special order for loyal, We appreciate your now. Please
high-value customer. Build loyalty. We’re ship it ASAP.
and ship it ASAP! point of sale
prepared to offer you
a version tailored to
your specific needs.
self-service
customer portal

priority
order
call center

expedited shipment
Agenda
Experience: Secret Sauce Behind CRM Success

CRM Next Best Action (NBA): Analytics Driving Value & Experience

Predictive models: The Analytical Heart of CRM NBA

Metrics of CRM NBA’s Business Impact

Case Studies of CRM NBA

Recommendations for CRM and BP professionals

CRM NBA: predictions guide every decision

how a particular
inventory levels
will respond to a
under various
particular offer
supply chain
at a particular
scenarios?
point in time?

aggregate cash on hand

customer under various
demand? financial
scenarios?
product pricing
trends? riskiness of
various
competitor availability of failures of critical business
actions? key factors of systems and strategies?
production? components?

And can you rapidly assess the bottom-line impact of likely scenarios?
 Predictive models: as diverse as CRM NBA use cases

CRM initiative
Multichannel life-cycle customer relationship
management
Brand, marketing,
Sales Customer service
CRM PR, and consumer
stakeholders teams teams
affairs teams

CRM Customer voice Customer lead Customer life-cycle

processes listening harvesting management

Customer Customer Customer Customer Customer Customer Customer Customer Customer

CRM awareness sentiment propensity identification qualification conversion onboarding retention growth
applications

CRM Customer Upsell and

models Awareness Sentiment Propensity Churn
Customer acquisition models value cross-sell
models models models models
models models
Predictive quality: avoid “next worst” actions

Predictive models are not crystal balls

Next Best Action models Junk models

should incorporate your
best historical customer
data... +

Junk data
....and include predictive
variables selected by your
top Next Best Action
=
domain experts
Junk guidance
Predictive smarts: experts needed to tune models

It’s not enough to hire a “quant” or “rocket scientist”...

Do you
have And are they
modelers automating as
who also much of the
understand
modeling
your Next
Best Action process as
scenarios? possible?
 Agenda
Experience: Secret Sauce Behind CRM Success
CRM Next Best Action (NBA): Analytics Driving Value & Experience
Predictive models: The Analytical Heart of CRM NBA
Metrics of CRM NBA’s Business Impact
Case Studies: Next Best Action in CRM
Recommendations for BP and CRM professionals
Q&A
Customers express quality of experience behaviorally
• Do customers find their relationship with your company
satisfying?
• Do they find it satisfying enough to stay in the relationship?
• Are they renewing, extending, and deepening the relationship
because you offer new ways for them to satisfy themselves?
• Are they enjoying the relationship enough to tell the world, or at
point of sale least their friends and family, about the value they’re receiving?
• Do they respond and accept new offers rapidly?
• Do they visit one or more of your channels frequently?
• Are they able to find and purchase what they need rapidly
self-service through your channels?
customer portal
• Are they recommending and influencing other people to
become customers, stay with you, and/or extend and deepen
their relationships with you?

call center
How do you quantify improvements in experience &
value?
CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE =
customer’s potential monetary worth through course of their relationship with your business, calculated
across entire CRM life cycle, including all functions, processes, channels, roles, campaigns, & touchpoints

MAXIMIZE Directly Repeat purchases; renewal rates; upsell & cross-

monetizable
sell rates; incremental yield in sales, revenues, and
profits per customer, channel, touchpoint,
interaction, and agent
Indirectly customer satisfaction scores, customer response
monetizable
and acceptance rates, customer sentiment trends,
customer recommendation propensities, Voice of
the Customer (VoC) scores, NetPromoter scores
MINIMIZE Directly IT and staffing costs associated with CRM
monetizable
processes (marketing, sales, customer service), and
with associated app, models, data, rules, etc.
Indirectly online shopping-cart abandonment rates; time to
monetizable
resolve customer issues; incidence of customer
complaints; lost opportunities due to misdirected,
redundant, or repetitive offers; incidence of wrong,
incomplete, or inconsistent info provided to
customers across various CRM channels
But this isn’t cheap: don’t goldplate the
experience!
Customer relationship management
Predictive
analytics, Enterprise data warehouse
business rules, Business process management

Front office/CRM
and Sales
Business rules management
orchestration Decision automation
models Predictive analytics and data mining
Text analytics tools Marketing
Behavioral analytics tools
CRM, EDW, DA, BPM, Complex event processing
BRMS, PA/DM, TA, BA, Conversation management
Service
CEP, CM, KM, etc. Knowledge management
Sentiment analysis And the processes
Recommendation Social media analytics
and channels
engines Dynamic case management
Business intelligence

This is a comprehensive These are the IT

customer experience investments involved in
management (CEM) NBA building out that platform
platform And the “rocket
scientists”
Agenda
Experience: Secret Sauce Behind CRM Success
CRM Next Best Action (NBA): Analytics Driving Value & Experience
Predictive models: The Analytical Heart of CRM NBA
Metrics of CRM NBA’s Business Impact
Case Studies: Next Best Action in CRM
Recommendations for BP and CRM professionals
Q&A
Targeting auto-generated offers from portal clicks
Company
• Japanese online retailer

Requirements and ROI

• Experience-focused goal: improvements in customer satisfaction
• Bottom-line metrics: improvements in customer retention, upsell,
and cross-sell; realized 30% increase in marketing campaign
revenue lift

Applications and approach

• Experience-boosting approaches: real-time targeting of next best
offers in B2C portal, recommendations driven by past purchases,
customer profile information, and customer clicked-on items in the
portal browser session
• Underlying NBA platforms and tools: predictive models and
complex rules
 Simplifying multichannel B2C conversations
Company
– European telecom carrier

Requirements and ROI

– Experience-focused goal and metric: enhance customer satisfaction
through simplicity of experience across multiple inbound and outbound
channels; has seen improvement in customer satisfaction but has not
compiled formal metrics
– Bottom-line metrics: improve customer retention; boost upsell and
cross-sell

Applications and approach

– Experience-boosting approaches: next best offers in call center
through auto-generated recommendations displayed to agents on
inbound contacts; next best offers through targeted outbound direct
marketing email, postal mail, SMS, and phone calls
– Underlying NBA platforms and tools: leveraging predictive models,
data mining historical customer data, and CRM marketing campaign
optimization
Personalizing cross-channel B2C interactions

Company
• British financial services firm

Requirements and ROI

• Experience-focused goal and metric: one-to-one personalization of B2C
cross-channel communications; improvements in customer satisfaction
• Bottom-line metrics: realized 20-30% increase in upsell and cross-sell

Applications and approach

• Experience-boosting approaches: targeted offers in outbound statement
inserts, direct email, and SMS messages; portal-based auto-prompts,
contextual reminders, and other sales and non-sales-related functions
• Underlying NBA platforms and tools: predictive models, data mining,
historical customer data, CRM marketing campaign optimization, and Web
analytics tools
 Agenda
Experience: Secret Sauce Behind CRM Success
CRM Next Best Action (NBA): Analytics Driving Value & Experience
Predictive models: The Analytical Heart of CRM NBA
Metrics of CRM NBA’s Business Impact
Case Studies: Next Best Action in CRM
Recommendations for BP and CRM professionals
Q&A
How to get started?
• Identify your key Next Best Action requirements in sales, marketing,
and customer service.
• Evaluate the Next Best Action features of your existing CRM
platforms.
• Evaluate stand-alone Next Best Action tools that can be integrated
with your CRM, EDW, BPM, predictive analytics, business rules
engines, and other infrastructure.
• Evaluate the customer experience management features of your
existing CRM platforms, as well as those of the social networking,
knowledge management, and other applications deployed across
your multichannel CRM environment.
How to succeed in the long-term?
• Make automated Next Best Actions the core of your CRM and BPM
strategies
• Couple a comprehensive CRM process with predictive analytics when
architecting next best offers.
• Make your EDW the foundation of your recommendation engine, but
also integrate existing investments in advanced analytics.
• Automate the modeling, scoring, and fine-tuning of CRM predictive
models that drive Next Best Actions.
• Continually measure experience improvements from your CRM NBA
initiatives and adjust your program to align performance with key
business imperatives