Next Best Action: How data enhances customer relationships?
6min • Last updated on Sep 12, 2025
Olivier Renard
Content & SEO Manager
The trend has been clear for years: more than 8 out of 10 consumers expect brands to deliver a personalised experience. Yet, only 10% of companies believe they achieve this (Salesforce).
This represents an invaluable growth lever, as 40% of customers spend more when they receive a high level of personalisation (Google / BCG). Marketers know that generic and standardised approaches have reached their limits. But how can personalisation be delivered effectively at scale?
Key Takeaways:
Next Best Action (NBA) involves recommending the most suitable action for each customer, based on their data and context.
It goes beyond Next Best Offer (NBO): it may be an offer, but also a message, a piece of content, or a tailored service.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and first-party data make this real-time, cross-channel personalisation possible.
DinMo’s Composable CDP enables marketing teams to deploy an NBA strategy without technical complexity.
🔎 Discover what Next Best Action is, its use cases, and its role in customer relationships. How do data and AI enable real-time recommendations of the most effective actions across all channels? 💡
What is Next Best Action (NBA)?
Next Best Action is a marketing approach designed to identify, for each customer, the most relevant action to take at a given moment.
This ‘best next step’ may be a commercial offer, a personalised message, tailored content, or even a proactive service.
The aim of NBA is straightforward: turn every interaction into an opportunity to strengthen the customer relationship. Instead of relying on generic campaigns, companies focus on the most appropriate initiative according to the user’s profile, behaviour, and context.
This approach differs from traditional planned campaigns, which often ignore individual signals. Next Best Action leverages customer data and Artificial Intelligence to continuously adapt decisions.
It enhances the customer experience, drives engagement, and maximises marketing return on investment (ROI), all within a customer-centric vision.
NBO vs NBA: What’s the difference?
Next Best Offer and Next Best Action are sometimes confused, but the two strategies have key distinctions. NBA is broader, as it also encompasses interactions and services.
Criteria | Next Best Offer (NBO) | Next Best Action (NBA) |
|---|---|---|
Definition | Recommending the most suitable product or service to a customer. | Strategy that recommends the most appropriate initiative for each customer at a given moment. |
Objective | Optimise conversion and boost immediate sales. | Improve engagement, strengthen satisfaction, and build long-term loyalty. |
Data | Transactional and product data: past purchases, browsing history, stated preferences. | Complete customer profile: history, behaviours, churn signals, channel preferences. |
Examples | Suggesting a complementary product (cross-sell) or a promotional offer. | Proactive reactivation of an inactive customer, loyalty message, personalised tutorial. |
Comparison between NBO and NBA
Thus, NBO primarily targets immediate conversion via traditional channels (email, website). NBA, on the other hand, relies on omnichannel orchestration and aims to build long-term loyalty.
The differences between Next Best Offer and Next Best Action
A must-have approach made accessible
Several factors are driving the adoption of NBA strategies:
The phasing out of third-party cookies is pushing businesses to rely more heavily on first-party data. These proprietary insights, collected directly from customer relationships, are more reliable and compliant with data protection requirements.
Barriers to entry have been removed. What once required complex projects is now achievable thanks to the democratisation of AI tools and increased server processing power.
Rising customer expectations. Generic campaigns are losing effectiveness. Brands must deliver personalised, consistent experiences across all channels in an increasingly competitive environment. Triggering the right action at the right time has become a true differentiator.
Immediate business impact. Next Best Action increases Customer Lifetime Value, reduces churn, and improves marketing ROI. Beyond enhancing satisfaction, NBA directly contributes to business performance.
Levers across industries
Special offers, targeted communications, proactive services, or loyalty opportunities: NBA can take many forms depending on the context. A few examples:
E-commerce: A customer abandons their basket. The company triggers an email followed by a push notification with a tailored offer.
Banking & Insurance: A churn risk is detected. The advisor reaches out proactively with an appropriate solution.
SaaS: A user remains inactive after signing up. A personalised tutorial is offered to help them get value from the product.
Retail: A loyalty programme identifies regular customers. Tailored product recommendations strengthen their engagement and attachment to the brand.
How does an NBA strategy work?
Implementing NBA relies on three pillars: data, technology, and methodology. Together, these allow the most relevant intervention to be recommended at the right time, on the right channel.
What data to use?
An NBA-oriented process requires reliable, comprehensive, and up-to-date data. The goal is to build a 360° view of each customer to anticipate expectations. This means combining multiple sources, including:
Customer data: demographic information (age, location, gender), purchase history, online behaviour.
Product and transactional data: product features, preferred categories, average basket size, spending patterns, sales seasonality.
Satisfaction and interaction data: campaign responses, customer reviews, NPS scores, churn or engagement signals.
To process this information, companies leverage machine learning and predictive AI techniques.
Next Best Offer often relies on collaborative filtering or content-based filtering recommendation models. Next Best Action uses more complex approaches, such as decision trees, reinforcement learning, or natural language processing (NLP) to interpret interactions.
In AI decisioning, real-time capabilities are critical. Models must continuously adapt to new behaviours to ensure every recommendation remains relevant.
Example of decision tree
Implementation steps
Deploying NBA involves a straightforward, step-by-step approach:
1️⃣ Centralise data to eliminate silos. This creates a single source of truth for unified customer profiles.
2️⃣ Segment audiences and define scenarios tailored to key moments in the customer journey (basket abandonment, inactivity, subscription renewal).
3️⃣ Set clear objectives: increase conversions, boost loyalty, reduce churn, grow average basket size.
4️⃣ Orchestrate activations across multiple channels (email, push, social, on-site) to ensure consistent experiences.
5️⃣ Measure and optimise continuously by tracking key performance indicators: retention rate, engagement, lifetime value (LTV).
This shifts businesses from a standardised logic to a dynamic, customer-centric strategy.
The role of a CDP in Next Best Action
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) fits seamlessly with NBA strategies.
In many organisations, data remains scattered across tools: CRM, analytics, email solutions, and ad platforms. This fragmentation hinders data-driven decision-making and limits personalisation.
The role of a CDP is to unify customer data into a 360° profile view. Marketing teams gain a reliable, up-to-date foundation to activate personalised scenarios.
With dynamic segmentation and activation features, it becomes possible to deliver the right message at the right time, on the right channel. Marketers can orchestrate campaigns independently of IT and sync their audiences with platforms.
DinMo’s differentiating approach
DinMo composable CDP is built on a modular architecture aligned with the Modern Data Stack. With no-code features, it is designed to make NBA accessible to everyone.
Composable, zero-copy solution: DinMo leverages the company’s existing data warehouse. No duplication is required, ensuring speed and compliance.
Reverse ETL: Segments created in DinMo are synchronised with marketing and ad tools via connectors. Business teams can directly trigger campaigns in their usual channels.
DinMo Intelligence: Built-in AI models enrich profiles with predictive scores. They cover multiple use cases: churn risk, customer lifetime value (LTV), product recommendations, preferred channel, and of course, Next Best Action.
AI Assistant: DAN converts natural language queries into actionable insights, without SQL.
Marketing teams can activate customer data in their day-to-day tools and orchestrate NBA scenarios at scale, autonomously.
Common use cases include:
Reactivating inactive users by detecting churn signals.
Upsell and cross-sell opportunities based on lifetime value.
Personalised product recommendations to strengthen engagement.
Challenges and best practices
Such a strategy may seem complex to implement, but a few best practices can turn your NBA project into a value-creating initiative.
The first challenge is ensuring data reliability. Without it, recommendations lose relevance. It’s better to centralise sources and start with simple scenarios before scaling.
Compliance is crucial. Personalisation must comply with regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and be accompanied by transparency towards customers.
On the technical side, numerous integrations can slow teams down. A composable CDP simplifies deployment by leveraging existing infrastructure and built-in AI models. With DinMo, the first use cases can be activated in less than a day.
Internal adoption is also key: marketing and data teams should collaborate from the outset around shared objectives. Regular KPI monitoring ensures continuous improvement.
Conclusion
Next Best Action is a powerful lever to personalise every interaction, strengthen loyalty, and increase the profitability of marketing campaigns. By harnessing data and AI to enhance the customer experience, companies move from generic campaigns to a customer-centric strategy.
At DinMo, we believe this capability should be accessible to everyone. Our composable CDP democratises data activation, giving business teams total autonomy: no-code segmentation, multichannel orchestration, and integrated artificial intelligence models.
👉 Discover how DinMo helps you activate your data to trigger your Next Best Actions!
