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Next Best Action

Use the power of context to deliver exactly the right customer experience

What is Next Best Action?

Next Best Action (NBA) is a customer engagement approach that utilizes a combination of artificial intelligence and real-time interaction data to create hyper-relevant customer experiences. By analyzing consumers unique needs, preferences, and context, brands can determine the most relevant and meaningful action to best engage customers and prospects across any channel at any time.

Next Best Action

How NBA is used

NBA allows marketing professionals to create a library of potential actions for AI to identify and execute the best one for each customer. Business rules dictate eligibility and context for these actions, ensuring customer interactions are relevant. This approach offers flexibility and precision, adapting to changing customer needs and improving satisfaction and loyalty across channels.

Why NBA is effective

NBA strategies enhance customer experiences over static marketing by using AI to deliver the most relevant content based on real-time data. This approach allows brands to engage customers uniquely, improving satisfaction and loyalty. NBA helps brands exceed expectations by providing what is needed at the right moment, boosting engagement and fostering long-term relationships.
AI automation: challenges

Create long lasting customer relationships with NBA

One of the greatest advantages of NBA is that it goes beyond just sales offers to consider all the potential conversations you could have with a customer. Over time, brands deepen connections and drive increased customer lifetime value (CLV).

The right action for the right moment

  • Service – support daily customer needs

  • Retention – keep valuable customers profitably

  • Nurture – keep your brand top of mind

  • Cross-Sell/Upsell – expand existing relationships

  • Acquisition – convert new customers

  • Resilience – safeguarding their financial state

How does Next Best Action work?

With NBA, your strategy will make the decision about which offer is best for your customer in each potential category.  Every company defines the next best action in its own way, but typically it’s the action that will increase CLV by the largest amount.

NBA on work

Crossing the chasm

Create better customer experiences, go from traditional campaign marketing to one-to-one engagement.
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How is Next Best Action different from traditional campaigns?

Next Best Action

  • Puts the customer at the center of their journey by enabling real-time interaction based on customer needs
  • Lets the brand pivot instantly to move with the customer, across any channel.

Traditional campaigns

  • Have static, pre-determined messaging that is delivered at pre-selected times
  • Campaigns oftentimes push products through a sales-first approach and are unable to pivot in real-time, wasting resources, money, and customer attention

Use cases for NBA

Financial services

Banks use next best action strategies to deliver personalized financial guidance. When a customer logs into their app, the system analyzes recent transactions and financial behavior to recommend actions such as consolidating debt, opening a savings account, or adjusting spending habits.

Healthcare

Health insurers apply NBA to promote preventive care. If a member is overdue for a screening or check-up, the system sends a personalized reminder through email, SMS, or a health portal, helping improve care compliance and long-term health outcomes.

Retail

In retail, NBA powers real-time product recommendations and promotions. As a shopper browses online, the system assesses their behavior and purchase history to display relevant items, bundle deals, or loyalty rewards that encourage engagement and sales.
Stylized stock image of two coworkers working together at a desk looking at a screen

Potential NBA implementation challenges

Organizations typically face several key challenges when implementing next best action:

  • Governance: Organizations need a well-defined governance structure with an established NBA governance board to oversee implementation and resolve conflicts. Without proper governance, NBA initiatives can become fragmented and fail to deliver expected results.
  • Team capabilities: Organizations must ensure they have a skilled NBA Execution Team capable of efficiently managing tactics derived from the overall strategy. This often requires upskilling existing staff or hiring specialized talent.
  • Data integration complexity: Organizations struggle with integrating various data sources and ensuring their decisioning technology can deliver personalized customer experiences across multiple channels. Data quality and real-time accessibility become critical factors.
AI and ML basics

What role does AI and machine learning play in NBA?

AI and machine learning are at the core of Next Best Action strategies, powering real-time decisioning in marketing and customer engagement. These technologies process large volumes of customer data—including interaction history, behavior patterns, and preferences—to predict and recommend the most relevant content, offer, or action for each individual. By continuously learning and adapting, AI and machine learning ensure that each engagement is timely, personalized, and optimized for impact.

The models that drive Next Best Action

At the core of every Next Best Action strategy are predictive and adaptive models. Predictive models look back—analyzing historical data to anticipate which offers, messages, or actions are most likely to resonate. Adaptive models look forward—learning in the moment from real-time data to understand whether an interaction is working and adjusting accordingly.

Why are NBA models important

Together, predictive and adaptive models provide a complete picture of each customer interaction. By combining historical insights with contextual and real-time signals, they ensure every decision is timely, relevant, and accurate.

Watch the video to learn how Pega’s Customer Decision Hub combines data, analytics, and adaptive AI to deliver real-time, hyper-relevant interactions.

What to know about NBA marketing

NBA marketing sits at the intersection of strategy, data, and technology—enabling brands to turn customer insights into timely, personalized actions that boost impact.

NBA optimizes marketing programs by identifying the most relevant content to serve – in the most appropriate engagement channel, when a specific customer or prospect is most likely to respond. This ensures that the brand is providing the next best experience for consumers and driving higher customer lifetime values.

Next-best-action programs use machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in an organization’s data assets to better predict and understand customer behavior – helping brands create and implement marketing strategies that effectively address consumer needs, improve response rates, and drive conversions.

Fresh, accurate, and organized data sets are foundational to next-best-action marketing. That’s because data analysis is at the core of this capability. Next-best-action models convert data into insights, which inform the AI-powered decisions behind each action.

Pega Next Best Action Capabilities

Next-Best-Action Designer

Design, monitor and control your one-to-one strategies.

Next-Best-Action Customer Journeys

Increase relevance of customer experiences.

Next-Best-Action Advisor

Provide recommendations while interacting with customers.

Maximize Customer Value with Next Best Action

Learn how Pega's Next Best Action capability enhances every customer interaction through proactive, data-driven recommendations. This powerful feature analyzes customer insights to deliver the right action at the right time across all channels, empowering your sales teams to increase customer value and drive meaningful engagement that converts.
Stylized illustration of an AI

The future of Next Best Action

The future of NBA is being reshaped by agentic AI, which enables systems to not only predict the best action but autonomously plan, adapt, and execute across complex journeys.

As agentic AI evolves, we can expect several key advancements:

  • Autonomous decision-making: Agentic AI can dynamically explore options, test strategies, and adjust actions in real time—without predefined rules.
  • Proactive engagement: Instead of waiting for customer input, AI agents can anticipate needs, initiate conversations, and coordinate follow-ups across channels.
  • Cross-channel intelligence: Agentic systems operate across departments and touchpoints, ensuring consistent, context-aware decisions at scale.

In platforms like Pega, agentic AI could elevate NBA from a rules-based recommendation engine to a continuously learning, self-directed decision system—driving hyper-personalized, end-to-end experiences.
Create Long Lasting Customer Relationships with NBA

Getting started with Next Best Action

To get started with next-best-action strategies, organizations should define program goals, such as decreasing customer churn, improving response rates, or driving better customer lifetime values. Then, aggregate relevant customer data sets from across their organization and implement the necessary AI-powered tools and applications to deliver against their goals.

Discover Pega’s various capabilities like the Pega Next-Best-Action Designer that can help you jumpstart your strategy, including segmentation, prioritization, and communication channels.

Frequently Asked Questions about Next Best Action

Some of the benefits of implementing a Next-Best-Action approach include:

  1. Personalized customer experience: NBA enables organizations to tailor their interactions with customers based on their preferences, behaviors, and historical data. This leads to a more personalized and relevant experience, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
  2. Increased engagement: By suggesting actions that are relevant to the individual customer's needs and interests, organizations can significantly enhance customer engagement. This can lead to higher response rates and better conversion rates.
  3. Higher conversions and sales: NBA helps in presenting customers with the right offer or recommendation at the right time, which can lead to higher conversion rates and increased sales. By suggesting products or services that align with the customer's preferences, the likelihood of making a purchase is improved.
  4. Consistency: NBA helps maintain a consistent approach across customer interactions. It ensures that each customer is treated in a manner consistent with their preferences and needs, regardless of the specific individual handling the interaction.
  5. Real-time decision-making: NBA systems often operate in real time, providing instantaneous recommendations or actions. This agility is particularly valuable in fast-paced industries where timely responses are critical.

While they might seem similar, there are distinct differences between NBA and Next Best Offer (NBO). The main difference lies in the scope of the strategies. NBO is more specific and focused on offering relevant products or services to customers, while NBA is a broader approach that encompasses a wider range of actions aimed at enhancing the overall customer experience and achieving business goals beyond just sales.

An NBA model is a predictive analytical tool or approach used in various industries to determine the most appropriate action to take in a given situation. The goal of an NBA model is to optimize decision-making by selecting the action that is most likely to yield a favorable outcome or maximize a desired objective.

NBA models typically leverage data analytics, machine learning, and predictive modeling techniques to analyze historical and real-time data about customers, users, or patients. By considering factors such as past behaviors, preferences, demographics, interactions, and current context, these models can make recommendations for actions that are likely to lead to positive outcomes.

For example, in marketing, an NBA model could analyze a customer's past purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographic information to suggest the next best product to promote or offer a personalized discount.

Next Best Experience (NBE) refers to a concept commonly used in marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and customer experience management. It involves using data analytics and algorithms to determine and deliver the most suitable and relevant experience to a customer at a given point in time. This could be in terms of product recommendations, content suggestions, or interactions, with the goal of enhancing customer satisfaction and engagement.

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