JT on EDM

Chris Skinner wrote a nice little piece on the Future Call Center over on the swift community. He had some nice examples, though he was focused on how the future call center might be using video. What struck me, though, was that decision making is critical to his example. Neither the avatar nor the video-linked person can be effective without automated decision making. If they don’t know what decisions can be made, if they are not told what is allowed/not-allowed, if they don’t have access to the decisions about personalized offers then they cannot deliver the experience he discusses. Passive presentation of information will not cut it – the person is unlikely to be able to be sufficiently responsive without decision automation (it will take them too long to review everything and then decide manually) and the avatar can’t do anything unless it is programmed to make decisions.

It also struck me that going overdrawn should have triggered a response – a decision should have been made about how to treat him when he went overdrawn and, for a good customer, this should have included a proactive promotion of the short term loan. Combining becoming more event-driven (a critical need for most financial institutions) with decision automation gives new meaning to proactive customer service (one of the recommendations of The Best Service is No Service, an excellent book).

If making your call center more effective is on your list of things to do I have written a number of posts on using decision management in the call center.

Note: This post was prepared earlier and posted this week while I am on vacation.