Customers are more inclined to act on recommendations when their current mindset aligns with the business's offering. These recommendations encompass upselling, cross-selling, personalized ads, and tailored content based on customer behavior. Identifying immediate behaviors and intents through ongoing interactions enhances the likelihood of successful recommendations.
While understanding customer preferences is often straightforward, the key lies in real-time learning during ongoing customer engagement. This is where real-time offers shine. Customers can seamlessly accept pertinent recommendations or offers as they shop, bank, or engage with content, aligning with their current activities.
Business Requirements
Pursuing a real-time offer initiative is typically a worthwhile business endeavor, and since it is often a data-driven effort, business requirements will tie closely with IT investments, as seen below.
The business must Identify the customer scenarios in which a real-time offer will increase revenue opportunities
The business must establish expected outcomes from this type of initiative, especially around revenue gains, which is then compared to the effort needed to deploy the initiative from an IT perspective
The expected return on investment (ROI) must consistent with or higher than other competing initiatives that the business is considering
The break even window for a real-time offer initiative must be consistent with or shorter than other competing initiatives
Cost of implementation must be low to ensure higher expected ROI
Ongoing total cost of ownership (TCO) must be low to allow a long-term strategy around real-time offers
Technical Challenges
If deploying real-time offers were easy, then everyone would be implementing these offers with their IT teams. The challenges that businesses face with such an initiative include the following.
Trying to create the right offer in a real-time manner with existing technologies that were designed for batch processing. Hazelcast Platform was designed to act instantly on data in motion, which makes it an ideal technology to quickly and easily develop real-time solutions that create offers for customers immediately.
Adding suitable technologies to an existing IT stack without adding more complexity, or adding more risk by replacing otherwise working components. Hazelcast can seamlessly tie into data flows in your existing stack to add real-time functionality to create immediate and relevant offers.
Creating and maintaining efficient, automated workflows that respond to customer behavior with ideal, personalized offers without requiring a significant hardware investment. Hazelcast offers a stream processing engine, combined with a fast data store, so you can build applications that take real-time data from your existing infrastructure data flows, quickly enrich that data with historical/reference data, and then calculate a real-time offer that can be presented whenever the customer is ready.
Why Hazelcast
Hazelcast provides a unified real-time platform that is well-suited to efficiently deliver real-time offers. Unlike traditional technologies that are designed for batch processing, Hazelcast helps businesses build applications that act instantly on data, to present customers with offers based on their immediate interactions with the business. Many businesses struggle to implement real-time capabilities, and some businesses even struggle to understand how real-time capabilities can be realized in their environment, but further investigation of Hazelcast Platform can help to close the gaps. Considering some of the other advantages of using Hazelcast as a unified real-time data platform.
Easy to Develop and Deploy
Hazelcast Platform was designed to simplify the application development process by providing a familiar API that abstracts away the complexity of running a distributed application across multiple nodes in a cluster. This allows developers to spend more time on business logic and not on writing custom integration and orchestration code. Our platform can seamlessly integrate with your IT architecture to add new capabilities without having to rip and replace your existing stack. The Hazelcast cloud-native architecture requires no special coding expertise to get the elasticity to scale up or down to meet highly fluctuating workload demands.
Performance at Scale
Whether you process a large volume of transactions, enhance online experiences with faster responsiveness, run large-scale transformations on data, or cut costs with a mainframe integration deployment, Hazelcast Platform is designed for the ultra-performance that today’s banking workloads require. The proven performance advantage is especially valuable for data-focused experimentation that enables ongoing business optimization, especially in data science initiatives including machine learning inference for fraud detection.
Mission-Critical Reliability
With built-in redundancy to protect against node failures, and efficient WAN Replication to support disaster recovery strategies that safeguard against total site failures, Hazelcast Platform was built to provide the resilience to run mission-critical systems. The extensive built-in security framework protects data from unauthorized viewers, and security APIs allow custom security controls for sensitive environments.
Customer Success Story
A global bank aimed to enhance its loan business and identified an opening to extend loans to customers displaying signs of requiring additional funds.
However, their advanced core banking architecture lacked provisions for real-time offers. The delay in calculating appropriate loan offers, typically a few days, often led customers to secure funding elsewhere.
To address this, the bank's core IT team leveraged Hazelcast stream processing to tap into dynamic data. Whenever customers sought money not available in their ATM transactions, a Hazelcast-powered application swiftly computed a suitable loan offer in real time, then delivered it to the customer via SMS. This real-time approach substantially increased loan offer conversions by 400%. Within a year, this strategic endeavor turned profitable, hinting at further revenue-boosting possibilities through similar initiatives.
Real-time offers are about delivering the right offer at the right time. Some examples of where this can lead to revenue growth are listed below.
Upsell/cross-sell merchandising based on customer activities happening right now, such as e-commerce customers putting a specific combination of items into the shopping cart, which could suggest other products that go well with the items in the cart
Personalized experiences on devices or kiosks based on customer history as well as the current interactions
Highly targeted ads on websites based on the visitor’s recent clickstream
