Siebel Order Management Guide > Setting Up Product Recommendations >

About Product Recommendations

Product recommendations allow a marketing administrator to define up-sell and cross-sell recommendations for a product. The marketing administrator enters the text of the recommendation message and a score indicating how important this recommendation is compared with other recommendations for the product.

When a sales representative uses the product catalog to add a product to a quote or order, the Messages list displays the recommendations for this product in order of their score.

The sales representative can click the Accept button in the Messages list to accept a recommendation, automatically adding the recommended product to the quote or order. The sales representative can click the Reject button to reject a recommendation, removing the recommended product from the Messages list.

If an upsell recommendation is rejected, then it will not be shown again to the same account or contact. If a cross-sell recommendation is rejected, then it will not be shown again in the same quote or order, but it is shown again if the same account or contact creates a new quote or order for the product. The administrator can change this behavior by editing the message type responses definition in the Unified Messaging Service.

For more information about editing the message type responses definition to change rejected recommendation processing, see Customizing Duplicate Message Suppression for Product Recommendations. For more information about working with the Unified Messaging Service, see Siebel Order Management Infrastructure Guide.

The way in which the message is displayed depends on how the message type was defined in the Administration - Order Management, Message Types view. For more information about defining messages, see Siebel Order Management Infrastructure Guide. The recommendations list can be displayed in two ways:

• If the display mode for the message was set to passive when the message type was defined, the messages are displayed in the UMF Messages applet in Catalog view and UMF popup applet (triggered using red flag icon) in Line Items view.
• If the display mode for the message was set to active when the message type was defined, the message(s) are displayed one after another in a modal dialog box in the descending order of the score. User must select a response to the message (such as Accept or Reject) or close the dialog box before proceeding.

In addition to displaying product recommendations that have been defined, the Messages list also automatically displays a recommendation for every product promotion that the customer is eligible for. This functionality only applies to product promotions, which are defined in the Administration - Product screen, Product Promotions view, and not to other types of promotions. For more information about product promotions, see Siebel Pricing Administration Guide.