As part of its ongoing series, the Naehas team is following up with a deep dive into the Requirements Checklist, developed in the Buyer’s Guide for Personalized Offers.
As detailed in the initial article in this series, we created an Offer Management Buyer’s Guide for Personalized Offers, which features success criteria from five leading financial institutions as well as best practices to create the processes, train the people, and deploy the platforms to deliver significant business value.
Next, a closer look at the functional requirements of Offer Management: Strategy, Eligibility, Presentment, and Fulfillment.
When selecting the right solution provider, identify those who can meet all the functional requirements that you need now and in the future. Ensure the solution has the ability to
manage the complete product and pricing lifecycle. Vendors who can offer tools and technology to address these functional requirements become valuable partners for the enterprise.
1. Offer Strategy
Addressing specific criteria requires careful review of the vendor’s capabilities. Examples: a flexible and easy-to-change offer data model; and the capability to manage all offer types (Retail, Card, Refer-a-Friend, Retention, Bundle, Multi-Relationship).
How does the vendor support the full range of offers? Will their solution allow cross-selling and/or bundle offers with multiple products?
The platform should allow all key stakeholders from strategy, finance and operations professionals the ability to collaborate in building out their offers. Additionally, the solution should provide a full set of functionality to easily create, modify and manage the offers, from
creation to archival.
2. Offer Eligibility
Offer eligibility is the next critical piece in the offer lifecycle. Here, teams choose the audience that will find the offer most compelling, and deliver the most risk adjusted value to the business. The vendor will need to provide some prioritization capability, as individuals in each audience might be eligible for many offers.
Here are just some of the requirements vendors should meet in this area:
- Build, view and customize audience selection
- Generate offer conversion and profitability metrics
- Forecast offer performance
- Integrate with all customer data sources
3. Offer Presentment
Of all parts of the offer management process, presenting the offers can create the greatest challenges because of cost and long cycle time. In such a highly-regulated industry, the complexities are immense. The manual, error-prone and time-consuming processes wreak havoc on Marcom and operations teams.
To address these pain points, look for a solution that includes five core capabilities:
- Offer content repository;
- Business-configurable rules engine;
- AI-powered quality control and auditing capability;
- Collaborative review and approvals process;
- Delivery engine to surface presentment-ready offers to all channels.
These capabilities allow for improved cycle time and decreased approval time, while also offering the ability to scale and increase volumes without needing additional headcount. This small but mighty portion of the Requirements Checklist goes far in supporting internal teams who are challenged to meet the functional requirements inherent in offer management.
4. Offer Fulfillment
Offer fulfillment is where the rubber meets the road. All the hard work in getting the customer to apply and take advantage of your offer could be wasted if they have a bad experience, fail to satisfy all stipulations, or do not receive the benefits in a timely manner.
In most financial institutions, the quality of the customer experience is pretty low. Due to the lack of proper tools, and reliance on manual or disconnected processes, both the banks and their customers are left wondering where offer subscribers are in the journey to get the promised rewards.
This lack of visibility into the customer’s status also causes additional challenges across the enterprise. This impacts product and segment owners, customer care teams, and compliance and legal teams in myriad and meaningful ways. Measuring the success of the offer, striving to respond to customer inquiries, and working to reduce customer complaints which may lead to MRA from regulatory authorities are all legitimate concerns.
Resources to Grow Relationships and Revenue
The right platform solution both addresses and improves upon each of the many challenges inherent in offer management. The result: a more efficient, effective process, and an overall better customer experience. The ROI: expanded relationships, increased revenue.
The Requirements Checklist is a valuable tool to best select a vendor with unique, automated, rule-driven tools that enable organizations to build and link complex offers to the right audience, in the right channel, every time, with efficiency and accuracy. Get your copy of the Offer Management Buyer’s Guide for Personalized Offers.
