JT on EDM

Wrapping up my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Mass Customization. John describes this as managing trade-offs and building sophisticated models to customize your response to each and every customer based on their value to you. John mentions decision engines in this context
This is my personal favorite. After all, customers treat the decisions you make about them as personal and deliberate so making sure they are both those things (not impersonal and accidental) makes sense. Using predictive analytics and fine-grained segmentation allows you to target small groups of customers based on their likely behavior and profitability and rules-based decisioning can ensure consistency and compliance so that customers get what feels almost like a personalized treatment while not requiring personal contact from staff members. Mass customization needs both integration, customer analytics and process integration but, as John says, offers potentially great ROI. Decision management to ensure the precision and consistency of customer treatments while retaining enough agility to respond quickly is critical.