Cross/Up-Sell & Next Best Offer

 Today global markets are within reach of every organization & there is a lot of pressure in increasing the revenues and market share.  Business leaders demand to know how customers and prospects are most likely to transact with them in the near and long-term.  

The explosive growth of various mediums to reach customers has made marketing an easy but costly affair.

Typical sales & marketing analytics will involve the following:

• Customer Segmentation – Grouping of customers based on demographics data, buying behavior or some other patters which are further used in marketing
• Customer Acquisition – Finding new customers with qualified sales leads
• Cross-Sell / Up-sell – Existing customers present an opportunity to grow revenues through cross-selling and up-sell strategies. Banks can use cross-selling to push credit/debit cards, checking account, investment banking services to savings account holders. Credit Card Company can offer Gold or Platinum cards to Silver cardholders. Use of Social Media Analytics is very useful.
• Channel – Optimize channel performance for sales success by identifying the best leads and channel partners to pursue across channels.
• Churn / Loyalty – Define the right targeting criteria and messaging mix to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Let us look at next best offer in more detail.

Next-best offer is the personalization & optimization of cross/up-sell. It is the use of analytics to identify the products or services your specific customers are most likely to be interested in, for their next purchase.

Here is the typical process for next best offer: 

• Consolidate & create a holistic view of the customers with the vast and growing amounts of transactional, demographic data.
• Apply predictive analytics techniques to customer data & identify trends in purchase behaviors and product affinities.
• Segmentation
• Decision trees
• Neural networks
• Use product affinities/associations to recommend other products or services customers may be interested in.
• It’s very important to close the loop by applying customer responses to future targeting that addresses customer needs.

This coupled with social media analytics of competition offerings or speech analytics of call center data will make cross/up-sell & next best offers more fruitful since they receive critical and indispensable feedback about the issues that matter most to customers, product improvement, service requirements and spending patterns.

Predicting the next product or service, customers are most likely to be interested in, not only improves customer lifetime value but also supports profitable and long-term customer relationships. 

With increasing global competition, optimal customer experience is of prime importance  !!!