PEGA Decision Management - What is mean by Next Best Action?

The primary role of Pega Decision Management is helping to determine the Next-Best-Action in customer-facing business operations.

NBA is a new approach to any type of customer interaction:

 

• Marketing
• Sales
• Service
• Retention
• Collections
• Fraud
• Data collection

It determines the optimal action, which the one that satisfies customer expectations while also meeting business objectives. 

It begins with the customer taking some sort of action such as calling into a call centre or responding to an email => system registers customer’s intent for this action. Then the data is being taken into consideration by Pega Decision Management, and decision strategies are being applied to create a mini business case, that will calculate the NBA for the interaction. Once its done, then the decision engine returns the Best-Action to take with the customer: either no action at all, service action, or make an offer or other. This is a never ending loop throughout the customer lifecycle.

Pega Next-Best-Action Marketing = Next-Best-Action Advisor, which advises agents on how to interact with customers (inbound) and can be used for outbound as well.

Interaction: Listen, Learn and Act accordingly => Interaction History captures customer responses to every NBA. Pega Decision Management combines traditional business rules with predictive analytics and interaction history to come up with the NBA.

 

The ultimate goal of Next-Best-Action is to optimize customer value:

• maximize the profitability of each customer relationship
• help retain profitable customers
• To do that NBA bases each decision on 2 things: what does that customer need right now, and then, what are the business objectives for this interaction?

Centralized Decision Hub delivers NBA to any available channel: CC, mobile or retails store at any moment. It continuously build on each other across every interaction in any channel.

To satisfy customer needs NBA has to have 4 characteristics:

 Contextual- must take into account the very last input the customer gave to the company
 Timely- must be taken in an appropriate timeframe, via the right channel at the right moment. This means in real-time in the inbound channels
 Relevant- must be right for that particular customer based on everything known about them at the moment of communication.
 Consistent- consistent across every channel, the messages and propositions they receive must be the same

On business side- 4 key strategic business directions: Growth, Service, Retention and Risk Mitigation, but also other things like budget and resource constraints (availability of a product) must be considered.

We will see more about this topic in coming days. Stay tuned.