Siebel Personalization Administration Guide > About Siebel Personalization >

Real-Time Product Recommendations Scenario

This section consists of the following topics:

• About the Real-Time Product Scenario
• Implementing Real-Time Product Scenario

About the Real-Time Product Scenario

A company sells thousands of products in many areas. A typical customer is likely to be interested in a small subset of those products.

The company wants to:

• Recommend only those products that are of interest to that particular customer.
• Make sure that the products shown are in stock and are profitable for the company.

Implementing Real-Time Product Scenario

Use the following steps to implement this:

• Create or borrow the recommended products user interface (a recommended items applet already exists in Siebel eSales).
• Write personalization rules to target content based on user profile attributes or other transaction data, such as past orders. For example, you can show customers products based on the industry they specified when they registered.
• Write personalization rules to recommend products based on customer behavior. For example, when a customer adds a product to his or her Shopping Cart, the ProductInCart persistent or dynamic user profile attribute can be set. Products defined in the Product Administration screen as being related to that product can be displayed to the customer for cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

  The following rule:

  EXISTS([Related Product] = GetProfileAttr("ProductInCart"))

  shows products that are related to products in the Siebel eSales Shopping Cart.

• Create a business service to access external data or check for business constraints. For example, you can use an ERP system to determine whether a product is in stock and how well it has been selling recently.
• Write personalization rules to access the business service and to show or hide products based on availability and profitability.

When customers enter the company's Web site, they see products appropriate to their industry or other interests. After adding products to the Shopping Cart, new products are recommended that complement the ones they have already selected. The customers are more likely to buy products that are useful and readily apparent.