Sell Your Products When It’s Time To
And make your customers happy too.
Learning Process
The process of selling products is not only dependent on its quality, although it is very important, but on the timing that those products are served to interested customers. The time is of the essence, as it is the the behaviour of users, meaning the actions they have performed in the past and they are performing right now, to be identified in a potential buying mood.
This is very important, because there is nothing more annoying that the right recommendations at the wrong time or the other way around. It is frustrating too, and can lead to a mistrust of the service, ending to a churn which is not good for your business.
Thus, you have to catch your clients mood and identify the right time, defining when their attitude is crossing a certain threshold that defines the impact of products’ characteristics on clients’ desires and needs.
Impact and behaviours
The behaviour of users is the sum of every action, weighted by a factor that is calculated in real-time.
The model is defined to detect a specific behaviour — which is the grey line in the chart on the left — that is calculated analyzing the sum of actions that each user makes.
But what is the use of this? This is to confront the user’s behaviours with the threshold, which works as a trigger to identify whether a user is in purchase mood or looking for suggestions.
Obsviously, both behaviour and threshold lines are subject to changes; the former is mainly based on personal actions, while the latter reflects the overall set of actions, from many users.
How the threshold works?
We consider the case of purchases. The threshold is determined by the pressure applied by different factors, on both sides of the fence: who wants to buy and what is up for sale.
- What is up for sale: it means the set of characteristics, details, items purchased, viewed, cart abandoned or any other important variable that could be useful to determine the attractiveness of that particular item;
- Who wants to buy: actions speak for themselves and they constitute a bag of information to calculate the pressure.
The concept of pressure is inherited from other fields and we borrow to define how various forces shape the overall area of the underlying environment.
What is the area of the environment? It is the set of actions that define a behaviour or many behaviours. If we consider an ecommerce as an example, one of the environment could be defined by the set of purchases and the actions are the views, add to cart, remove from cart, modify the cart and the purchase itself.
Borrowing the concept of pressure, we define as the force (action) applied to the surface (environment) per unit area over which that force is distributed. Without going into many details, we consider the pressure a stress to the environment. And the stress might alter the environment itself.
So, the idea is that the actions performed up to a particular moment define an environment, which is subject to change due to the pressure transmitted through actions. The environment is a changing state, which could be completely transformed and assume a state which is completely different from the original.
Thus, a set of historical actions contributes to shape a specific environment, as described in the picture below
The equilibrium generated by different forces defines the boundaries for the environment and the system adjust the perimeter in order to identify which user is within this environment.
Then more actions are performed, triggering new vectors and imposing new forces, with the result of re-shaping the environment itself. The picture below shows some unbalanced forces, which apply pressure in only one direction, stretching the boundaries to shape a new environment.
The new actions applies a certain amount of pressure to the surface, defining the set of behaviours for that environment. What does it mean from a practical point of view? That the actions from users contribute to continuously shape the environment, defining new behaviours that could be tracked by the algorithms.
When is the right time?
The right time is where the environment is shaped in a way that favors certain actions, facilitating certain behaviours. In other words, there is a right time for holding off and a right time for pushing products. Any action which is triggered at the wrong time may have as consequence the frustration from your customers.
Therefore, our algorithms crunch historical data to define an environment and the different variables that shape the environment itself, then calculate the pressure imposed by new actions, reshaping the environment and derive which behaviours are more common in any specific environment. Only when the algorithms recognize that it’s a right time for recommending, a proper recommendation is fired, otherwise just hold. At the very end, no one wants a door salesperson to ring our bell when we are in the middle of something we love!
