Real-time interaction management (RTIM) is an umbrella term coined by Forrester to describe the phenomenon of delivering contextually relevant marketing to users across devices.
As customers come to expect highly personalized digital experiences, real-time interaction management has emerged as one of the top trends in marketing technology. Furthermore, advances in machine learning have greatly improved marketers’ ability to act on their vast datasets, taking RTIM from pipe dream to reality.
Real-time interaction management can be broken into five key functional areas:
- Recognition — Understanding your customer behavior and affinity to build actionable customer segments
- Context — Ensuring that digital experiences align with the context in which users are browsing. How did your users arrive at your website or mobile app? Is it snowing in the city where they are shopping? Are they seated comfortably at home or browsing your mobile website from a packed train?
- Offer — Providing personalized recommendations, messaging or incentives to convince a user to convert.
- Orchestration — Delivering a unified experience across devices. If a user visits your mobile website but abandons the session, can we immediately return that user to context when he logs in from a desktop device two days later?
- Optimization — Maximizing the value of RTIM by measuring the impact of every interaction and automatically testing different experiences at all stages of the funnel.
Omnichannel personalization is the core element of real-time interaction management as it is vital to tailor experiences to each users’ behavior, affinity and context. We expect to see investments in real-time interaction management increase significantly in the coming years as personalization continues to be a strategic priority in e-commerce, media, travel and several other industries.
