Improving incentive policies to salespeople cross-sells: a cost-sensitive uplift modeling approach

In this study, we present a novel cost-sensitive approach for uplift modeling in the context of cross-selling and workforce analytics. We leverage referrals from sales agents across business units to estimate the individual treatment effects of incentives on the cross-selling outcomes within a company. Uplift modeling is employed to predict relationships between salespeople that should be encouraged based on the probability of successful cross-selling - defined when a customer accepts the product suggested by sales agents. We conducted experiments on data from a Chilean financial group, evaluating both statistical and profit metrics. Exploring various machine learning classifiers for predictive purposes, we observed a significant improvement over the current approach, which exhibits an uplift below 0.01. Finally, we show that selecting the best classifier with profit metrics results in a 31.6% improvement in terms of average customer profit. This emphasizes the importance of defining an adequate compensation scheme and integrating it into the modeling process.