---
title: What is Candidate action?
url: https://markin.ai/glossary/candidate-action
category: Markin vocabulary
---

# Candidate action

> A candidate action is one specific intervention eligible for one specific customer at one moment: an offer, a message, a price, a plan change, a support intervention or deliberately doing nothing. Candidates are scored against each other, and only the winner is released to the systems that execute.

## Why it matters for ARPU

Personalisation fails when every team pushes its own action into the same inbox. Treating interventions as competing candidates is what makes restraint possible and prevents contact fatigue from eroding ARPU.

## Related terms

- [Arbitration](https://markin.ai/glossary/arbitration), Arbitration is the step that resolves competing candidate actions for the same customer into one decision, ranking them by expected value under constraints such as contact limits, budget, fairness and business priority.
- [Next best action](https://markin.ai/glossary/next-best-action), Next best action is the single intervention that maximises expected value for a specific customer at a specific moment, chosen across every available option including doing nothing.
- [Eligibility rules](https://markin.ai/glossary/eligibility-rules), Eligibility rules define which actions a customer may legally, commercially and contractually receive: consent status, market availability, existing plan, discount history, regulatory constraints.
- [Contact policy](https://markin.ai/glossary/contact-policy), Contact policy governs how often, through which channels and with what spacing a customer may be contacted.

## Go deeper

- [Next best action marketing](https://markin.ai/blog/what-is-next-best-action), The pillar guide to per-customer, per-moment decisioning.
- [Customer decisioning](https://markin.ai/solutions/customer-decisioning), Scoring and releasing candidate actions.

Source: https://markin.ai/glossary/candidate-action