Managing offers

Offers are built from sellable items, which in turn are built from features. Offers represent the tailored products, services, or bundles that can be offered to customers. An offer is divided into three facets:

  1. Feature: A feature is something that you can count, price, or measure. For example, access to make deposits is a feature. There are mandatory features and optional features, so you can control which features are optional and which are mandatory. Features represent the building blocks, from a banks perspective, when providing services to customers. For example, the ability to cash a check, to make a deposit, to charge interest, and so on. Features are the core capabilities that the bank must offer.
  2. Sellable item: A sellable item is something onto which the services might be applied to, for example a credit card. In other words, a sellable item is what a feature is applied to. Some banks would call this product or an independent unit.
  3. Offer: An offer takes one or more sellable items and decides exactly how it wants to be sold. It includes the exact pricing, a target marketing, target segments, and locations. For example, what is the pricing, what are the terms of editions for that sellable item and through what channels should this be sold, what copyright text, what geographies, what devices?

Offers are managed in the Offer Catalog. The offer attaches all of the constraints and refines the optional features that are available. You might have two different offers that are being presented to two different groups with two different sets of optional features on the same core product such as a checking account.

Creating an offer

An offer takes one or more sellable items and defines exactly how the offer is to be sold. It can include information such as pricing, target market segments, and locations.
  1. In the left navigation pane, select Offer Catalog from menu to add the module.
  2. In the Offer Catalog, right-click on a category from the Offer Types hierarchy to which the new offer is to be added.
  3. To save the offer, you must provide a name for the offer.
  4. Click the different tabs in the pane to view and supply offer details and click Save. A unique Offer ID is generated by the system.

Updating an offer

An offer can be updated when you need to modify information on the offer, such as changing target market segments, target locations, pricing, or fees on features.
  1. In the Offer Catalog, select the offer to be updated.
  2. Make updates to any of the tabs as required and click Save.

Removing an offer

If the offer has been published to the physical MDM, as indicated by the Last Successfully Published field, the offer remains in the physical MDM. The publish function does not automatically delete the offer from the physical MDM.
  1. In the Offer Catalog, select the offer to be deleted, and click Delete.

Assigning a channel to the offer

Sales channels define the ways in which an offer can be made available to target customers. In the sample banking solution, the various available sales channels are defined by using the Channels hierarchy. Additionally, certain channels have additional attributes that can be applied to the offer. To access these attributes, the channels must first be assigned to the offer.

Channels must be added through the Sale Channels grouping in the Marketing tab. The corresponding categories in the channels hierarchy are added automatically to the offer and appear in the Categories tab. The sample banking solution does not allow you to map a Channels category in the Categories tab, or use the Add Item’ function on a Channels category from the left navigation pane.

  1. Click the Marketing tab.
  2. Click the Add More link on the grouping for Sales Channels.
  3. Select a channel from the list, and click Save.

Removing a channel from the offer

Sales channels can be removed from an offer. Any additional item attributes associated with the offer will also be removed automatically.

Channels must be removed through the Sale Channels grouping in the Marketing tab rather than through the Categories tab to ensure that any additional attributes that are associated with the channel are removed properly from the offer.

  1. Click the Marketing tab.
  2. Under Sales Channels, click the Delete the occurrence icon next to the channel to be removed, and click Save.
    If the selected channel has additional attributes that apply to the offer, they disappear from the Marketing tab. The channel category is also removed as a mapped category in the Categories tab.

Adding related offers for up-sell or cross-sell

One or more up-sell and cross-sell offers can be added to the offer. Since the procedures for both are similar, only the procedure to add an up-sell offer is listed here.
  1. Click the Marketing tab.
  2. Click the Add More link on the grouping for Offers to Upsell.
  3. In the entry field that displays, click the Expanded View icon (which appears when you place the cursor in the entry field).
  4. In the Offers to upsell dialog window, ensure Offer Catalog is selected for Catalog.
  5. Select an offer from the Display list. Alternatively, you can use the search functions to search for the offer in the same dialog window. Click OK to add the selected up-sell offer, and click Save.

Publishing an offer

Using the workflow feature in the collaborative MDM, an offer can be published to the physical MDM. Meaning, the offer details are captured and are added or updated to the physical tables in the physical MDM. When publishing an offer, there might be additional dependent business objects that also need to be published to the physical MDM. These can include specs, categories, and hierarchies. The Publish Offer function in the sample banking solution automatically determines all of the dependent business objects that are required by the offer for it to be successfully published, and publish those objects to the physical MDM first before publishing the offer.

Instead of having the Publish Offer workflow automatically detect and publish all of the dependent categories, hierarchies, and specs, these can also be published separately before publishing the offer.

Limitations: The attribute types of Relationship and Lookup table which link to other business objects are not supported by the MDM unified spec in the current release. These attribute types simply are treated as strings when published to the physical MDM. In the sample banking solution data model, there are a few fields that are defined with these attribute types. As a result only numeric IDs are published to the physical MDM instead of values that are meaningful to end users. Examples of attributes in the Offer spec having such attribute types:
  • Offered Items/Item
  • Offers to Cross-sell
  • Offers to Up-sell
  • Fees/Fee Feature
  • Rates/Rate Feature
  • Currency Type

Offers deleted from the collaborative MDM are not synchronized with the physical MDM through the publish offer function.

  1. Select the offer from the left navigation pane, and click Checkout.
  2. Select the Publish Offer workflow. Alternatively, you can access the Publish Offer workflow by right-clicking on the offer from the left navigation pane.
    If the offer is successfully published, the offer is updated with the following information: Last Successfully Published and Last Publish Results.
    If the publish fails, the workflow is in the Fixit step, and the relevant error message is listed in the Last Publish Results fields of the offer. If you encounter this situation, resolve the errors and republish the offer.