The dynamic 'just-in-time' decision making behind a real-time offer aims to exploit a given customer interaction defined by website clicks or verbal contact centre conversation.
The intrinsic and prevailing 'heavyweight' nature of the key CRM vendors at this time, who were generally focused on major back and front office system integration projects, provided an opportunity for niche players within the campaign management application arena.
To help gain acceptance with in-house specialist data mining stakeholders, the real-time solutions also support external model scores and execution within offer decision making.
The essence of this abstraction layer is that the MRM application orchestrates strategy, stakeholder sign-off, budgeting, program planning, campaign execution and effectiveness reporting across inbound real-time and outbound marketing disciplines.
The term "real-time marketing" has the potential weakness of self-limiting the underlying decisioning server capability to cross-sell and up-sell despite the observation that this particular function is generally the most compelling aspect of the application class.