Elevating Customer Experience with AI-enabled Omnichannel Next Best Action

The Engagement Challenge in Healthcare

In an era where data is abundant and customer expectations are higher than ever, creating a personalized, meaningful experience is key to building lasting relationships. In healthcare, this challenge is amplified as healthcare professionals (HCPs) are in`undated with communications from various pharmaceutical companies. On average, an HCP receives nine solicitations daily. However, much of this outreach is uncoordinated, irrelevant, or poorly timed. This disjointed engagement approach not only frustrates HCPs but dilutes the effectiveness of the messaging.

The fragmented nature of outreach efforts in healthcare is symptomatic of a broader issue: the inability to deliver personalized, targeted engagements at scale. This problem is exacerbated by several factors:

1. Uncoordinated cross-channel efforts – Teams working in silos often deliver conflicting or repetitive messages to the same customer.
2. Irrelevant content – Content fails to align with the customer's immediate needs, reducing engagement effectiveness.
3. Poor timing – Outreach is often mistimed, missing critical windows for engagement, rendering interactions less impactful.

Without addressing these issues, companies struggle to deliver a cohesive customer experience, limiting their ability to stand out in an increasingly competitive environment.

AI-Powered Personalization: The Role of Omnichannel Next Best Action (NBA)

As companies strive to create more meaningful and personalized customer interactions, AI-driven solutions like Next Best Action (NBA) offer a powerful approach. NBA uses data and artificial intelligence to orchestrate highly personalized interactions across multiple channels. By determining the best action for each customer based on their behavior and preferences, NBA optimizes every interaction to ensure relevance and timeliness. NBA delivers the right content, to the right customer, through the right channel, at the right time. By leveraging advanced AI models, companies can continuously refine their engagement strategies, improving both the customer experience and business outcomes.

Omnichannel Next Best Action (NBA) leverages a combination of customer data, brand strategy, and real-time optimization to deliver personalized engagements across multiple channels. The process is centered around three key data points:

1. HCP Profile & Demographics: Understanding the healthcare professional’s background, preferences, and professional behaviors is foundational for effective outreach.
2. Sales Trends: By analyzing trends within the HCP’s account, including prior sales and interactions, the system can identify key opportunities for engagement.
3. Exposures & Engagement History: Tracking both personal interactions (eg: calls, rep emails, speaker programs etc.) and non-personal promotions (eg: emails, banners, alerts etc.), allows for a more comprehensive view of how and when the HCP prefers to engage.

By orchestrating these insights with the company’s brand strategy and operational constraints, NBA continuously optimizes the cadence, channel, and content of each interaction. The result is a dynamic, personalized experience that resonates with each HCP, improving the overall engagement and commercial outcomes.

Impact: For companies in healthcare and beyond, NBA offers tangible benefits. Companies leveraging NBA have reported a 4-10% increase in sales, with engagement improvements of 30-40%. These gains come from delivering more relevant messaging in preferred channels, optimized for the specific needs of each customer. By integrating NBA into their customer engagement strategy, companies can achieve significant commercial impact, ensuring their communications stand out amidst the noise.

Building a Scalable Omnichannel NBA Solution: Key Components

To implement an effective Next Best Action (NBA) solution, companies need to focus on several critical components to ensure that their solution is scalable, adaptable, and capable of driving meaningful results. Here’s what goes into building a robust NBA solution:

1. Data Integration – Gathering and organizing data from multiple sources (e.g., customer profiles, sales data, and engagement history) is key to enabling AI models to function effectively.
2. AI/ML Models – These models predict the best time, channel, and content for customer engagement, continuously learning from each interaction to improve personalization.
3. Real-Time Decisioning – Real-time analytics allow companies to dynamically adjust strategies based on customer behavior and engagement patterns.
4. Omnichannel Orchestration – Seamlessly integrating NBA across multiple channels ensures a consistent experience, whether through field or marketing interactions.
5. Monitoring & Feedback – Continuous monitoring through dashboards enables companies to track performance and refine their NBA models based on real-time feedback.

Focusing on these pillars, companies can build an NBA solution that is both flexible and scalable, capable of delivering measurable results while staying adaptable to changing customer preferences and business environments.

Implementing Omnichannel NBA: Getting Started with Databricks

Organizations can accelerate their journey towards AI-enabled customer engagement optimization by using solutions like the Databricks Next Best Action Solution Accelerator. These pre-built frameworks provide the foundation for implementing NBA models and improving customer interactions quickly and effectively.

The future of customer engagement lies in AI-powered solutions like Next Best Action. By adopting NBA, companies can elevate their customer experience, drive better engagement, and deliver significant commercial value. With proven results across industries, NBA is a critical tool in the modern marketer's arsenal.

Contact Ankit Singh ([email protected]) for any additional questions or information.