Next Best Action (also known as best next action, next best activity or recommended action), is a customer-centric approach to marketing that considers multiple different actions that could be taken for a specific customer and then decides on the best one to provide. Moreover, Next Best Action commonly requires the need for automated self-learning decisions, using machine learning, to make a decision in real-time that will improve the chances of a conversion at the moment that a customer is making a purchase decision.

By the CDP Institute’s RealCDP definition, a true Customer Data Platform must be able to ingest data from any source, capture the full detail of that data and retain it indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints), create a unified profile of an identified individual (that is, a Single Customer View or SCV), and share that profile with any system that needs it. This sounds like a marketer’s dream – but doesn’t guarantee that marketers will be able to access and leverage that data to gain insights, enrich the customer profile, and meet regulatory obligations. For that, an added user interface is needed.

According to Gartner, “Access to customer data, in real-time, unifying profiles across channels and ability to measure comprise the competitive playing field that will define the coming years,” allowing retailers to effectively personalize cross-channel customer journeys.

A Customer Data Platform, or CDP, helps by bringing in huge amounts of online and offline customer data from a multitude of sources, then cleansing, deduplicating and unifying this information into a Single Customer View that can then be accessed by all other marketing channels, platforms and business intelligence tools.

To then unify these profiles across channels, look for a CDP with ‘orchestration’ or campaign management capabilities, which will function as a ‘smart hub’ to orchestrate and trigger all your channels from a central decision-making point.

The chance to see into the future and know how much a customer is going to spend with you is an opportunity that no business would ever turn down. Unfortunately, without any time-traveling DeLoreans, crystal balls (or an incredible discovery by a quantum physicist) this isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

The closest thing that we have to a crystal ball in marketing is predictive analytics – a technique that is much older than you might think, with origins that go back as far as the 1940s.