The Effectiveness of Up-sell/Cross-sell Offers (Cont'd)

The Power of Predictive Modeling
There are three components that are essential to maximizing the power of predictive modeling: Analytics, Technology, and Agent Recruitment and Training.

1. Analytics
Analytical tools that allow users to quickly sort through large amounts of data to find trends and patterns provide the “brains” for predictive modeling. They let companies draw on demographic and behavioral information about customers to select offerings that are likely to meet each customer’s needs, as they call in. The analytic engine should be able to access a variety of information, including:

• Customer data, such as customer transaction history, products/services purchased or currently used, past product/service usage, customer tenure, and customer value.
• Market data, such as demographic and/or psychographic information, life stage information, and other data that may provide insight into the customer’s buying preferences.
• Call disposition data, including data that reflects the customer’s contact behavior and willingness to consider a sales offer during future contacts.
• Products and/or services data available for an up-sell or cross-sell offer, such as buyer demographics, marketing data, and cross-purchase data.
• Business rules data, reflecting the enterprise’s marketing goals and business model, to ensure that offers are in sync with overall business and marketing strategies.

Targeted selling recommendations are the primary advantage offered by a predictive model-based initiative and the quality of those recommendations is dependent on the design and data capabilities of the analytics component.

Several different analytic methods can be used to create product recommendations for up-sell/cross-sell. The best method for any given application is largely dependent upon the kind and quality of data available and the aims of the up-sell/cross-sell initiative.

Suppliers of analytics should be able to offer best-practice suggestions based on other implementations they have completed. And, as always in sales and marketing, there is no substitute for testing with your own customers and products.

2. Technology
An up-sell/cross-sell initiative needs technology that can convey customer contact data to the analytics engine, and then relay the results of the analysis—that is, the tailored offering—to the appropriate agent’s desktop. This movement of data to and from the analytics engine is performed in real time, to enable agents to respond quickly to customers.

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