Often Interaction Management systems are used to implement a customer Best-Next-Action recommendation capability. This is a typical usage in large financial services, insurance and telecommunications providers.

[The common usage is Next-Best-Action rather than Best-Next-Action and I have never really understood why this is. It may be because people find the acronym easier to pronounce, or that they like the acronym NBA better than BNA in that it is shared with the National Basketball Association or the Net Book Agreement. I have always preferred Best-Next-Action as Next-Best sounds like second-best.]

In discussions about Best-Next-Action systems there is often a conflict between the worlds of risk and marketing. Broadly speaking decisioning is typically found in the world of credit risk, fraud and compliance. This is typically a request to ensure that some business process can proceed based on all of the known context. In contrast a recommendation system is typically a marketing led operation where there is no single answer required or designated authority required but instead a set of best-next-action recommendations. Particularly in online  environments many recommendations are consumed by a web site in a single session or even page.

Also these two domains have different ways of configuring their content which is naturally led by the “process flow” single decision thinking for decisioning and the many possible outcomes world of marketing. It is common to find graphical process modelling paradigms in risk based decisioning and rule-based ranking paradigms in marketing recommendation systems.

These ar predominantly focussed on marketing recommendation systems, however with our broad definition of customer-centric marketing it is possible to include risk decisioning in marketing recommendation engines, but not the other way around. The main focus of how to operate recommendation style systems changes to how do I map my customer strategy into such a system. How do I know what to do for each type of customer in each and every circumstance and how do I specify what is the most important of all of the possible actions that I could take. Development and implementation of the Customer Strategy and Prioritisation are key topics in Interaction Management.