Who should receive an action?
Prioritise entities by expected incremental value rather than a single propensity score.
Next Best Action · Decision Optimization
Combine predictive signals, causal evidence, expected value and real constraints to decide which action should happen next for each customer, account, store or operational unit.
Questions this decision model answers
Prioritise entities by expected incremental value rather than a single propensity score.
Choose among offers, messages, interventions or operating actions based on expected outcome and eligibility.
Include expected value, treatment cost, margin and downstream consequences.
Respect contact limits, budgets, inventory, staffing or other scarce resources.
From data to decision
Next-best action is a decision layer. The right inputs depend on whether the business is optimizing retention, cross-sell, marketing, inventory or operations.
Use propensity, risk, demand, customer value or other predictive signals relevant to the decision.
Use causal evidence where the goal is to know whether an action changes the outcome rather than merely correlates with it.
Encode which actions are allowed, available and operationally feasible.
Optimise expected business value and return the recommended action with supporting evidence.
Decision boundary
A customer can have high purchase propensity but low incremental response to an offer. An intervention can create uplift but destroy margin. Next-best action combines these layers so the recommendation reflects expected business consequence, not one model score.
Estimate risk, propensity, demand or value.
Estimate incremental effect when causal evidence is available.
Choose among eligible actions under economic and operational constraints.
Related decision problems
Direct answers
Not necessarily. A recommendation engine often predicts relevance. Next-best action can also include causal impact, economics, eligibility, capacity and business constraints.
No. The method should match the decision. Causal modeling is most useful when the business needs to know whether an intervention changes an outcome.
Yes. The decision object can carry the recommendation, expected impact and evidence while the responsible team keeps final approval.
Yes. Graphite Note can expose recommendations through a decision layer or API so they can enter CRM, ERP, BI, workflow or other operational systems.
We will structure the model around the action your team needs to take and the evidence required to support it.