This weekend, my wife and I finally caved in and took our one-year-old to a local family-friendly restaurant. We’d always avoided noisy, kid-filled restaurants. Any app which suggested a visit to such a place would have had zero success.

Even now, offer this to me on a weekday and you can forget about it – I'm just not in that mode. However, catch me on a Saturday mid-morning and you have a good chance of success. Same offer, same person, different context = very different result.

This led me to think about how context matters above all. Marketing used to consider context as being your life stage, monthly spend, or other glacially-paced perspectives. Nowadays, every minute counts.

Making an offer others cannot refuse

Sometimes, in modern life, it feels like we are being stalked by banks, mobile operators and insurers, who want to squeeze every last cent from our wallets.

I see this at many of our clients - with marketing under pressure to generate more leads for each product manager, the saturation of the consumer's life with up-sell offers at every possible touch point becomes intense.

While a consumer may be responsive to an up-sell or retention offer at certain key moments, or via certain channels, it's unfortunately true that they will probably be unresponsive more frequently. 

Next Best Offers (NBOs) attempt to personalise the offers which a consumer might receive via the various channels by considering some recent context, although rarely in anything close to real time. HBR said of batch driven NBOs that "[m]ost are indiscriminate or ill-targeted pitches to customers” that are “more likely to create ill will than to increase sales”.

HBR also noted that context, as well as channel, were key in determining the Next Best Offer and how to deliver it. This is difficult to achieve at scale.

Think before you speak

Many of SAS’s customers are now exploring how to be more 'contextually aware', via 'real time' decisions, realising the limitations of batch-driven NBOs. Each customer reacts uniquely and you need to understand their current life context, and journey to this point, to influence behaviour.

I see this as ‘thinking before you speak’. Before jumping in with a pre-planned offer, take a look around and consider the customer’s current  mood or intention. These triggers are all around, if you can figure out how to detect and use them. But the context changes by the minute. How can you react quickly enough?

Exploiting Business Moments

Gartner Research defines the outcomes of customer touchpoints or 'Business Moments' in three categories, of which you must focus on only one outcome per touchpoint. These are:
'sales outcome', 'service outcome' and 'brand outcome'.

Problems occur when the moment is misinterpreted. It's vital to choose one outcome to focus on in order to deliver relevant and personally impactful outcomes, as opposed to exploitative ones.

For example; A banking customer logs into their bank's mobile app while at the airport. The app will provide an offer when they log in.

What offer should be served? Contextually, an offer related to an account upgrade to use the affiliated airport lounge may be an obvious next offer. But if, in real-time, we know the customer already qualifies for the lounge, an account upgrade offer is not relevant. Therefore, to achieve a ‘sales outcome’, an NBO such as a home loan up-sell may seem like the best option.

However, is the customer getting maximum value from being affiliated to your bank? Maybe they don't know they qualify? What if a competitor offered lounge access if they were to transfer

Instead, let's use the ‘business moment’ to inform the customer that they qualify, and that they can go straight to the lounge. We've now achieved our ‘service outcome’, while enhancing customer loyalty.

Even if an upgrade offer to move from gold to platinum would be relevant, the customer couldn't actually perform the upgrade immediately. Instead, we could provide a once-off pass to the lounge to experience life as a platinum customer. We've achieved a ‘brand outcome’ - but we will definitely remind them of the upgrade as soon as they land back in the country.

And what if the customer just browsed the 'account cancellation' FAQ on the app? Suddenly all bets are off and we need to switch to ‘service outcome’ mode immediately and give our best retention offer as quickly as possible.

How to deliver the right outcome

To capitalise optimally on business moments, they must be exploited by technology in order to be effective at scale.

Let me be clear; customer journey mapping or website analytics will not deliver this capability. The level of real-time decision making required is beyond such technology and requires real-time analytical decision-making. In my next post, I’ll talk about what to consider when embarking on such initiatives.

For more information, visit www.sas.com. Alternatively connect with him on Twitter.