5 tips to choose your Next Best Offer (NBO) solution

By: Johana Moreno Product Manager at Zelros

Have you experienced buying something that is not well adapted to your situation, with costly plans and options that you can not benefit from?

To avoid deceiving their customers with this type of experience, brands need to adapt their offering and messaging to each personal situation. Rather than pushing offers, companies have to focus their engagement strategies on understanding what their customers need. 

Sophisticated technology is now available to help companies deliver a more customer-centric experience and take the next best offer to the next level with advanced recommendation engines. Recent progress has made it possible to move from a high-level rules-based engine (for example, if the customer is part of such and such a segment, we should recommend such and such a product) to the era of hyper-personalization.  Companies are now able to solve the customer satisfaction equation:  recommend the right product/offer at the right moment to the right person.

Here after we outline 5 tips to select your NBO solution.

1 – Industry Expertise

There is no such thing as a generic recommendation engine. Recommending the best movie to spend a nice evening with your partner is quite a different task than recommending the best insurance coverage to give you more peace of mind before going on vacation. The user behavior and the type of products recommended are very different. The table below illustrates why recommending consumer products is radically different from recommending insurance offers.

Zelros is 100% dedicated to insurance offers. The core of the recommendation engine is powered by insurance specialized algorithms. Our data processing pipelines are tailor made for the insurance products and their data.

2 – Multichannel

Now is the time for brands to adapt to their customers’ behavior, not the other way round. Customers expect brands and products to be available on the channels of their choice all throughout their buying journey. Customers seek advice online, then compare different products on comparison sites and then get a quote. As they’re not sure they may call a customer service center to get clarity on coverage and then complete their application online. In insurance, a customer has multiple options when looking for a product: direct online channels, carriers, front-line employees, captive agents, independent agencies, brokers, comparators, or retailers just to name a few. Brands need to ensure that the recommendations are consistent across all touchpoints.

NBO solutions are the cornerstone of customer experience consistency. To do so, they must  be designed for omnichannel experiences. Zelros provides recommendations on every channel. Each touch point is leveraged with consistent messaging through a unified platform that orchestrates the end to end journey. Customers can now choose the channel that works best for them. Insurers can be more relevant, connected to real customer habits and preferences, and are able to increase opportunities in any distribution channel. 

3 – Hyperpersonalisation

Today’s customers demand personalization in the way brands engage with them. Data is the fuel of personalized experiences. The good news is that, there never has been more data available to develop robust customer intelligence and provide relevant recommendations.   

In insurance, while first party data can be used to build simple scoring, next generation recommendation engines must leverage 3rd party data to be relevant. Providing insights based on the current customer context is critical to building interest and empathy. For example, during a period of climate risk, a customer living in a house in the countryside has quite different protection needs than a city dweller living in a flat. NBO solutions have to take into account the 360 view of the customer, including their current situation at the time the recommendation is made. 

Zelros partners with leading data providers to enrich its proprietary catalog of recommendations, adding relevant contextual details (weather risks, demographics, wealth, etc.) to insurers’ customer knowledge.

4 – Agility

What’s the point of having a NBO solution if it does not directly help your customers and advisors? Recommendation engines need to be easy to deploy for customers in digital journeys as well as for advisors in their CRM. You should therefore choose a software that provides CRM connectors for advisors, digital snippets with few lines of code and easy integration to reach end customers.

At Zelros, we make it easy to deploy our recommendation engine for advisors with simple apps available for any CRM. End customers can see our recommendations in their selfcare portals with our ready to use widgets. Finally, our platform is API-first with advanced tools for developers and can be integrated as well into any home-grown application.

5 – Transparency & Trust

How would you react if you saw an interesting message on your computer recommending you an action you had never thought of? Personally, I would like to know why I received this message. Why is this item recommended to me? Recommendations provided by an engine must be trustworthy to the person receiving them, be it a customer or an advisor. 
At Zelros, we are very much involved in the Responsible AI movement. Our platform produces recommendations that are fully auditable and ethical. We identify biases in datasets or analyze performance on specific groups of population to ensure that everyone receives fair recommendations. We monitor the predictions made to ensure that models behave consistently over time and suggest improvement options accordingly.

Want a demo? Contact our sales team or meet us at ITC Las Vegas at booth 3253!