---
title: What is Next best action?
url: https://markin.ai/glossary/next-best-action
category: Decisioning and next best action
aliases: NBA
---

# 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. It spans channels and teams, and it is decided per customer rather than per campaign.

## Why it matters for ARPU

It is the mechanism through which a decision layer raises ARPU: the same base, the same channels, but a better choice made for each person each time.

## Related terms

- [Next best offer](https://markin.ai/glossary/next-best-offer), Next best offer selects the most valuable commercial proposition for a customer: which product, plan, bundle or price to present.
- [Candidate action](https://markin.ai/glossary/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.
- [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.
- [Real-time decisioning](https://markin.ai/glossary/real-time-decisioning), Real-time decisioning evaluates a customer's current context and returns an action within the latency budget of the moment, typically tens of milliseconds inside an app or call.

## Go deeper

- [Next best action marketing](https://markin.ai/blog/what-is-next-best-action), The pillar guide to per-customer, per-moment decisioning.
- [Einstein Next Best Action](https://markin.ai/blog/next-best-action-salesforce), How the Salesforce implementation works, and where it stops.
- [Next best action](https://markin.ai/solutions/next-best-action), The Markin implementation.

Source: https://markin.ai/glossary/next-best-action