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Traditional marketing organizations are transitioning from a focus

on campaigns and outbound marketing to a multichannel approach

based on Next Best Action.

In a recent study on data driven marketing, Teradata found that over 50% of

marketers are using seven or more channels to communicate with their customers.

Over 70% of them also use traditional channels such as direct mail, call center, and

print advertising1. Unsurprisingly, this leads to the current situation in which 65% of

marketers say silos within marketing prevent them from having a

holistic, cross-channel campaign view2. Even when marketers are

making progress integrating their channels they still struggle

with targeting customers across multiple systems and

measuring effectiveness. Solving this problem is top of

mind for CMOs and increasingly it is CMOs who

are driving technology spend.

This trend toward more integrated marketing is

being compounded by the big data movement.

Big data is increasingly seen as driving

innovation in marketing, especially when data

from channels that are not relationally

organized such as weblogs or call center

logs to provide a history of customer

behavior. Social, mobile and sensor data all

reflect on the customer journey. Truly

integrated, multichannel, next best action

marketing must take account of big data. In

fact, some estimate that 45% of big data

deployments are about marketing3.

To succeed in delivering cross-channel, next best

action marketing organizations need integrated

marketing solutions that can deliver consistently

across a wide range of inbound and outbound channels.

Most marketing departments have focused on outbound

marketing in the past and must now adopt new technologies

for inbound marketing. This inbound marketing must be integrated

with their traditional campaigns to deliver a consistent, targeted, effective

customer conversation.

Integrating Inbound Marketing

Teradata Real-Time Interaction Manager Integrates

Inbound Decisioning with Outbound Campaigns to

deliver Next Best Action.

James Taylor

CEO

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions

CONTENTS

Moving To Next Best

Action

Integrating Inbound

Marketing

Teradata Real-Time

Interaction Manager

Teradata Integrated

Marketing Management

Moving Forward

Sponsored By

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 2

Moving To Next Best Action

Effective acquisition, retention, and development of customers have never been

more important. Every interaction with a customer—regardless of channel—is an

opportunity to establish a dialogue and build and extend a relationship. Marketers

know that they are most effective when they can engage their prospects and

customers in an ongoing, interactive dialogue. It gives them time to develop a

relationship, time to establish the likes and dislikes of an individual, and time to build

awareness of their brand and their product’s value proposition in the minds of

customers.

The Internet, social media, mobile devices and technology are highly interactive. This

creates new opportunities for a more effective dialog. At the same time it also

creates a complex, multi-channel environment that makes sustaining such a

customer dialogue difficult. Customers interact with companies and brands across

these multiple channels while expecting companies to act like a single entity

regardless. Poorly managed or channel-specific customer treatment decisions result

in messages and offers that seem inconsistent and incoherent, confusing customers

and reducing brand value.

Customers respond to a company’s offers and messages as though they are personal

and deliberate—as though the message was sent only to them personally. Too many

companies treat people as groups, not individuals, and treat each communication

separately rather than as part of an ongoing dialogue. As a result, they make

decisions that seem impersonal and accidental. Their communications have no

context and don’t make customers feel valued. They give no sense that the

customer’s needs are understood. To effectively build a dialogue, companies need to

make customer treatment decisions that are as personal and deliberate as they can.

All this means that

marketers must

effectively manage the

many decisions about

how to interact with their

customers—what to push

next, what to say and

how to respond to

inquiries—across all the

channels those customers

use. Successful dialogues

depend on making

effective decisions about customer treatment at each stage, about what to do next.

If these customer treatment decisions are not managed systematically and made in a

Figure 1: Multi-channel Decisions Matter

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 3

way that truly engages customers, no dialogue can be established and no relationship

of value can be built.

Every customer interaction is an opportunity to extend a dialogue with that

customer and so build a stronger relationship. Whether a personalized marketing

offer or some proactive customer service, each interaction must be thought of in

terms of maximizing the value of your customer relationship. To ensure this, many

organizations are developing Next Best Action programs.

A Next Best Action program considers all possible actions, from marketing offers to

customer service actions, and selects the one most likely to build long term value no

matter what the context or channel. Next Best Action programs optimize each and

every decision across the customer lifecycle—from customer acquisition to cross

and up-sell, retention, customer service and more. Next Best Action programs

optimize every customer interaction in an increasingly complex multi-channel

environment and ever-increasing volatility in customer relationships.

In many ways Next Best Action programs recreate how successful small businesses

work with their customers. A successful small business owner knows a lot about

their customers and community. They remember their customers from interaction

to interaction. As a result they can personalize and target each interaction to create

very high quality customer relationships. In organizations that must rely on large

numbers of staff, systems and processes to interact with customers, Next Best

Action programs create this same sense of personalized, focused interactions.

At the heart of effective Next Best Action programs are decisions—decisions about

offers, about eligibility, about treatments, about the actions to take to serve a

customer. A focus on these decisions across every channel is essential to a

successful Next Best Action program. In particular, Next Best Action programs

require the effective integration of inbound marketing with more traditional

outbound channels.

Integrating Inbound Marketing

Next Best Action programs bring together both inbound and outbound customer

interactions.

For inbound conversations, customers expect a response to their question or

issue that reflects their relationship with the company. Next Best Action

programs build on answering the inbound issue and aim to deliver additional

value to the customer while developing a better long term relationship.

For outbound interactions, Next Best Action programs aim for meaningful,

relevant, personalized outreach to customers. They also identify the right time

for the action—now, next time the customer is sent something, after their next

paycheck—as well as the right channel for it.

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 4

Integrating inbound marketing with existing outbound marketing activities involves

taking advantage of all the information—you have about customers, making sure that

inbound decisions are made in the context of outbound marketing, and following a

rigorous process for delivering inbound marketing messages.

Integrating inbound and outbound marketing requires a true cross-channel

orientation when it comes to customer information. All too often information about

the customer that could have been used to make a more personal decision is left

unused. Instead of all the information from all channels being fed into every decision,

each channel uses its own information set. Even when information from one channel

is available to another, companies do not apply it systematically to improve

customer treatments. At best, companies pull data from one or two additional

channels when making decisions. To properly integrate inbound and outbound

channels, data from all channels should be used to improve decisions.

Inbound decisions are also made in the context of recent, and perhaps planned,

outbound treatment decisions. Knowing which campaigns have been targeted at a

customer as well as what has been said to them recently in outbound channels

matters when deciding what to say on an inbound channel. At the same time

planned outbound actions can be changed to reflect inbound interactions,

customizing messages or campaign participation based on recent interactions.

Effective inbound marketing requires a rigorous process to deliver the right message

each time.

The customer must be profiled accurately in real-time and using both historical

and contextual information. Increasingly this is a big data problem with non-

traditional data sources playing an important role.

Which offers or actions a customer is eligible for needs to be determined and

issues such as governance and contact history resolved using business rules to

make sure that nothing inappropriate is going to be proposed.

This candidate list can then be filtered and prioritized using analytics to target

customers with offers or other actions that are most likely to provoke a positive

response and generate future value.

It may not be possible to offer all customers the best offers due to caps or limits.

Continuous improvement requires ongoing A/B testing. This kind of tradeoff and

testing finalizes the offers or actions to be proposed.

All this work returns an offer or suggests an action—directly to a customer through

an interaction point in a channel like a website or mobile app, or by providing a

script or prompt to a person working in a call center or in-person channel.

An effective solution manages every step of this process, brings the wide range of

organizations that must be able to participate together and assembles 1st party data,

session data, behavioral data, context and even 3rd party data to drive decision-

making.

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 5

Teradata Real-Time Interaction Manager

Teradata Real-Time Interaction Manager (RTIM) is the evolution of the Market Helm

technology Teradata acquired in 2011 and handles inbound marketing and real-time

offer management. It takes all of a customer’s interactions and determines the best

offer or message to respond with. It manages customer messages in a central

repository, delivers them on-demand to customer touch point applications and, as a

customer interacts with a company, determines the best one to display. Business

users configure how to deliver this content to websites or channel-specific

applications in contexts such as cross-sell and up-sell, customer retention and

partner marketing.

Architecture

The overall RTIM architecture is shown in Figure 2: RTIM Architecture below.

Figure 2: RTIM Architecture

Source: Teradata

1. An Admin UI is used by business users to configure campaigns and messages

2. Customer interaction channel requests go to a decision server.

3. Decision servers load any existing data for a customer from the data store or

other source and write it to the shared Session cache for subsequent use in the

session.

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 6

4. Decision servers reference the Session cache and any new session data to return

the most effective messages.

5. The Session server closes expired sessions and writes learning tags and contact

history to the data store for future analysis.

6. Learning servers run periodically to generate new statistical models and then

notifies the Decision servers so these can be integrated into decisions.

Messages

Different groups can “own” the messages managed by RTIM (corporate, web,

marketing, etc). Each message has a basic definition and this can be extended using

client-specific data like margin, fulfillment method, product codes etc. Messages can

be categorized into different classes and flagged as appropriate for different channels.

The various data elements (some pre-defined, others identified by the user as being

available in a specific channel or system) are available in a tree-like view.

A set of conditions can be

defined based on these elements

and ANDed or ORed together

in various combinations using a

point and click interface. The

message history and current

interaction can be used to build

rules that understand things like

“displayed in the last 10 days in

any channel”. Client-specific

attributes can be defined with

allowed values and this too

drives the UI to display the

allowed value in the context of a

condition. This end result is a

rule that defines eligibility for

each message and prioritization of these messages is defined.

Message Strategy

A central concept in RTIM is that of a message strategy. Message strategies describe

how messages are selected and prioritized. As shown in Figure 4: Message Strategy

And Arbitration below, the user can select from various business objectives defined

in the system and give them a relative weight. Messages are associated with the

objectives and arbitration metric to specify how messages would be prioritized.

Once defined, the user can identify where within the customer interaction to use

the message strategy.

Figure 3: Message Manager

Source: Teradata

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 7

Figure 4: Message Strategy And Arbitration

Source: Teradata

Analytics and Reporting

RTIM has a full range of

reporting capabilities. In

addition, analytic models

can be defined outside

RTIM and passed in as

scores for use like other

customer attributes.

Two self-learning models

are built automatically by

RTIM to assess the

likelihood of a customer

accepting (by channel) and

the likely impact of the message on interaction length (longer or shorter). Each

model shows how different attributes contribute and can be used to prioritize the

messages displayed.

Figure 5: Analytics and Reporting

Source: Teradata

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 8

Teradata Integrated Marketing Management

Teradata Real-Time Interaction Manager is part of the overall Teradata Integrated

Marketing Management suite shown in Figure 6: Teradata IMM below,

Figure 6: Teradata IMM

Source: Teradata

Teradata IMM has components designed to handle everything from marketing

operations to campaign management, customer engagement through real-time

interactions across channels and driving relevant marketing analytics for improving

customer engagement and operations. Specifically:

The Marketing Operations components support plan and spend management,

workflow and project management, and asset management.

Campaign Management supports a decision-centric approach to campaign

management with support for real-time marketing and outbound marketing.

Real-Time Interaction Management focuses on handling inbound marketing offers

and interactive channels.

A Customer Information Hub brings together inbound and outbound activities to

focus on the next best offer or next best action for a customer.

Teradata IMM also has links to digital marketing platforms focused on web analytics,

to Salesforce automation and CRM systems and to email marketing providers.

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 9

Campaign Management

Campaign management in Teradata IMM is evolving along with the transition

occurring in the market. The traditional view of Campaign Management originally

involved identifying segments, targeting segments and selecting channels before

developing and executing campaigns to deliver this. As companies have transitioned

to more digital channels, and more real-time digital channels the approach focuses

on segmentation, dialogue design, digital messaging and real-time interaction. This is

managed from a Customer Interaction Management (CIM) hub that pulls together all

the various elements. From analytics (BI, web analytics and predictive analytics) as

well as attribution and channel management for inbound and outbound channels to a

focus on creating dialogs with customers and on responding to events with event-

based marketing.

Customer Interaction Management Hub

Figure 7: Teradata Customer Interaction Management Hub

Source: Teradata

The Customer Interaction Manager hub lays out customer journeys and interaction

or campaign flows. Data can be pulled in from Teradata Products but also from

Oracle and SQL Server. Social channels, like Facebook, are integrated so customer

data from these channels can be added. This integrated view allows segmentation to

be developed across all these different sources of customer information. Campaign

flows can include emails, obviously, but the content of these emails can be

customized based on the real-time state-of-the-customer interaction.

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 10

Advanced and predictive analytics can be used in the segment definitions and real-

time responses can be injected into the flow to ensure it responds to customer

actions. This provides a “traditional” campaign view that integrates inbound events

and social channels—users can immediately respond to customer interactions but

can also use those interactions to change what happens on a scheduled campaign.

When deployed with the Customer Interaction Management hub Teradata IMM

coordinates communications automatically between the inbound and outbound

channels, consolidating contact history, leveraging common marketing collateral, and

sharing business rules. This allows integrated approaches such as following up on an

offer via an SMS a few hours after the customer browsed related content or offer

collateral on the website. This integrated approach to interaction management is

shown in Figure 8: Inbound and Outbound Integration below.

Figure 8: Inbound and Outbound Integration

Source: Teradata

Integrating Inbound Marketing

© 2014 Decision Management Solutions 11

Moving Forward

Teradata Real-Time Interaction Manager (RTIM) is a mature Next Best Action

solution available on-premise or in the Teradata Cloud. RTIM can be deployed

standalone, with no other products from Teradata, or as part of an integrated

solution when combined with the rest of the Teradata Integrated Marketing

Management suite. Similarly, while there is integration with Teradata and Teradata

Aster, RTIM can be integrated into a variety of data infrastructures.

RTIM provides some powerful capabilities for Next Best Action. RTIM can help

companies address a wide range of challenges including:

Launching a new digital marketing initiative.

Coordinating real-time decisioning with campaign management.

Integrating contextual, social, and digital data sources.

Managing and testing different customer experience strategies.

Leveraging big data infrastructure.

For more information on Teradata Real-Time Interaction Manager go to

www.teradata.com/Teradata-Applications/Solutions/Real-Time-Interaction-Manager/

References

Taylor, James. Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to using Business Rules

and Predictive Analytics. New York, NY: IBM Press, 2012;

1. Data-Driven: How marketers profit from technology in a multi-channel world

2. Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey 2013, Global

3. How Forrester Clients are Using Big Data. Forrester Research, September, 2011

Contact Us

If you have any questions about Decision Management Solutions or would like to discuss engaging us we

would love to hear from you. Email works best but feel free to use any of the methods below.

Email : info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com

Phone : +1 650 400-3029

Web : www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com

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