Create Action Strategies

Think of action strategies as the decisioning brain. Action strategies let you load all of your recommendations and constantly evaluate them based on your business rules to determine which ones to surface to your users. You can create action strategies for different users and departments, such as your call center, inside sales department, or French-language website.

Let’s take a look at how to create a new strategy.

1. Click Setup.
2. Enter Next Best Action in the Quick Find box and select Next Best Action.
3. Click New Strategy.

   

4. Enter the Name, API Name, and Description.
5. Define the Object Where Recommendations Display (that is, if you want to display them on contact records, accounts, cases, and so on).

Once your action strategy is created, you’re taken to the Strategy Builder to populate it. Here’s a great example of our action strategy for the telecom example.

Action strategies convey recommendations flowing from left to right, getting cut off as they move to the right along the branches, leaving only the ones who remain on the far right. Each element on the Strategy Builder is referred to as a node. The yellow nodes are for recommendations. The blue nodes filter recommendations based off of business rules, and the pink ones sort them. Finally, all the way on the right is the red node—the winning recommendations that will surface.

Check out the branch with our TV streaming recommendation example, and disregard all other branches for now.

If you double-click the blue filter node to the right (Has_Internet), you can see that it filters through contacts who have the Internet_Service record checked. This means they have our Internet service and can be upsold the TV stream service.

The next node on the right filters out contacts who already have TV streaming service.

For the rest of the action strategy, we created a few upsell recommendations and branches.

• Online security—for contacts in the continental US who don’t have online security.
• Tech support—for contacts who don’t already have tech support.
• International plan—for international customers.

We then bucketed those recommendations into Upsell Offers and sorted the recommendations in alphabetical order so there is a hierarchy of recommendations for each contact.