Overview
Creating a Real-Time Next-Best-Action Data Pipeline with Tealium
AI Type: Predictive AI
Key Industries: Banking, Insurance, Telecommunications, Healthcare
What is Next Best Action?
Next best action (NBA) is a data-driven strategy that uses analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to determine the most relevant and effective action to take for a specific customer or situation—in real time. This enables organizations to deliver highly personalized and timely responses, improving both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
💡 Real-time decisioning refers to the automated process of analyzing incoming data and triggering an appropriate action or recommendation within milliseconds.
Tealium plays a pivotal role in enabling next best action by powering real-time data collection, processing, and activation across channels. Organizations can implement NBA using:
- A packaged vendor (e.g., Pega)
- AI models powered by unified customer data stored in a data warehouse
💡 Unified customer data combines identity, behavior, and context into a single view, often centralized in cloud-based data warehouses such as Snowflake or Databricks.
Tealium’s real-time streaming ensures that NBA platforms or models receive the most current and comprehensive data to support accurate predictions and recommendations.
💡 Predictive AI uses historical data to forecast future outcomes or classify information, helping organizations make data-driven decisions.
Use Case Maturity Levels
Basic
Use a next best action vendor to create offers for proactive outreach (e.g., Pega). This level relies on predefined rules and manual intervention. It is not automated and can be executed in batch or scheduled outreach – like email offers.
Advanced
Integrate Tealium with a next best action vendor to provide consistent cross-channel offers. This level introduces automation and coordination between systems to enhance the customer journey.
💡 Cross-channel orchestration means delivering consistent actions across platforms—e.g., a recommendation shown on a website also appears in an email or mobile app notification.
AI-Powered
Build a real-time data pipeline using Tealium and AI models for predictive NBA. This level leverages predictive analytics and real-time decisioning to deliver highly contextual and personalized recommendations – in-the-moment or in-session.
💡 AI models are systems trained to predict outcomes—such as what product a customer is likely to buy—based on historical and behavioral data.
Key Benefits
Personalized Customer Engagement
Real-time NBA insights enable personalized offers, recommendations, or support actions based on each customer’s most recent behavior and context, ensuring seamless and relevant experiences.
Improved Conversion Rates
Tailored recommendations based on AI-driven predictions can significantly improve conversion rates and sales by anticipating customer needs and delivering precisely what they’re looking for.
Increased Customer Loyalty and Retention
AI-powered NBA pipelines adapt to evolving customer behavior and proactively recommend actions to reduce churn. This helps build trust and fosters long-term relationships.
Operationalizing AI Models
Tealium’s AI pipeline helps organizations move insights from data science to execution, ensuring that next best action models are deployed across channels with minimal delay.
💡 Operationalizing means making AI outputs usable in real-world workflows—not just reporting, but actually driving customer actions automatically.
Enhanced Real-Time Capabilities
With Tealium’s real-time streaming capabilities, businesses can process and act on data as it’s generated, improving agility, responsiveness, and customer satisfaction.
💡 Unlike batch data processing, streaming pipelines transmit and process data continuously—triggering actions as events happen.
Example Use Cases Across Industries
Banking: A customer logs into their online banking portal and checks interest rates for savings accounts. In real time, the bank detects this behavior and, based on the customer’s profile and financial history, recommends a high-yield savings product through an in-app message or follow-up email. Additionally, if unusual transaction patterns are detected, an AI model can flag it for fraud prevention and prompt the user to verify identity in-session, rather than after the fact.
Insurance: When a customer updates their address after moving to a new home, the system can instantly assess which new policies or coverage types may be relevant. For example, it might recommend bundling a homeowner’s policy with auto coverage to unlock savings, presenting this offer during their next online session or via a personalized email. AI-powered NBA ensures the recommendation reflects current life changes and customer risk profiles, while the customer is interacting with the brand.
Telecommunications: A customer’s data usage spikes significantly, suggesting they may need a new mobile plan. Tealium is aware of the spike in real time and feeds that information into a model that identifies the optimal upsell offer. The system can then display a custom promotion for a higher-tier plan via SMS, mobile app notification, or directly in the billing portal—before the customer calls to complain about overage charges.
Healthcare: A patient visits a hospital’s online portal to review post-operative instructions. Based on this and prior appointment history, the system identifies a need for a follow-up consultation and immediately surfaces an option to schedule one. In another case, if a patient regularly searches for information on managing a chronic condition, Tealium can trigger a personalized wellness program offer sent through email or mobile app engagement.
In each case, a real-time pipeline detects key customer signals, uses AI to predict the optimal next step, and activates a tailored response—turning engagement from reactive to proactive and making personalized experiences scalable, repeatable, and relevant in the moment.
Pipeline Architecture Overview
Figure 1: Real-time Next Best Action data pipeline with Tealium and AI integration – from collection to activation.
- Customer Interactions are collected by Tealium as event-level data from various sources including mobile, web, and AI interactions (e.g. chatbots). These ‘in the moment’ events trigger our real-time data pipeline.
- Tealium Functions allow custom logic or transformations to be added to the data pipeline, enabling dynamic enrichment or triggering model scoring inline. In this case we are using Functions to call the AI model for each event that arrives. Each customer event is passed to the AI model which then predicts the Next Best Action to take such as a product offer for the customer.
- Cross-channel orchestration is a key strength of Tealium’s with 100’s of partner technology integrations that enable real-time activations such as marketing outreach and online advertising. In our Next Best Action use case, it is the combination of the incoming customer event combined with the predictive score that are able to inform any downstream activation such as targeted online advertising vs email outreach.
Implementing a next best action pipeline is ultimately about operational agility—detecting customer behavior, making informed predictions, and responding with precision in real time. With Tealium’s flexible data infrastructure and integration capabilities, teams can deploy AI-driven personalization incrementally, starting with high-impact use cases and scaling from there. The result: a more intelligent, responsive experience for customers—and a more measurable impact for the business.
