James Taylor (@jamet123) of Decision Management Solutions (@decisionmgt) discusses real-time integrated marketing, data-driven marketing, and how to integrate inbound decisioning into outbound campaigns.

1. Integrating Inbound Marketing
Teradata Real-Time Interaction Manager Integrates
Inbound Decisioning with Outbound Campaigns to
deliver Next Best Action.
James Taylor
CEO
CONTENTS
Moving To Next Best
Action
Integrating Inbound
Marketing
Teradata Real-Time
Interaction Manager
Teradata Integrated
Marketing Management
Moving Forward
Sponsored By
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.
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2. Integrating Inbound Marketing
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
Figure 1: Multi-channel Decisions Matter
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
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3. Integrating Inbound Marketing
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.
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4. Integrating Inbound Marketing
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 nontraditional 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 decisionmaking.
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5. Integrating Inbound Marketing
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.
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6. Integrating Inbound Marketing
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
Figure 3: Message Manager
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
Source: Teradata
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.
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7. Integrating Inbound Marketing
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.
Figure 5: Analytics and Reporting
Two self-learning models
are built automatically by
RTIM to assess the
likelihood of a customer
accepting (by channel) and Source: Teradata
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.
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8. Integrating Inbound Marketing
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.
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9. Integrating Inbound Marketing
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 eventbased 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.
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10. Integrating Inbound Marketing
Advanced and predictive analytics can be used in the segment definitions and realtime 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
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Integrating Inbound Marketing
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
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