call center

Teradata – National Australia Bank and next best action

April 27, 2010

National Australia Bank group (a 15 year Teradata customer) presented on their use of Teradata for multi-channel marketing. NAB has 10.9M customers worldwide and about 38,000 staff. Brock Lynch, from the marketing group within the retail bank, gave an overview of their analytical CRM approach. NAB sees its analytical CRM assets as:

Complete customer data stored [...]

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Silverlink update

April 21, 2010

I did some work with Silverlink some time ago and was really impressed by their use of decision management to improve the communication of health plans and others in the healthcare space with members and patients. I got a chance to catch up with them recently to discuss progress and their use of adaptive control [...]

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What exactly does real-time sense-making mean

April 13, 2010

Jeff Jonas of IBM had a great post on Some Organizations Will Be Smarter-er Than Others recently in which he discussed his “obsession with real-time sensemaking systems”.
Now I like the phrase and, in the context of real-life, it is clear what it means. But for a business, what does it mean?
Well sometimes it means [...]

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Don’t rely on your staff’s ability to do math

April 8, 2010

I often tell folks that one of the benefits of decision management is that it enables analytic decision making – that is decisions based on accurate analysis of data about what works and what does not – even by people who don’t have any analytic skill. For instance, using analytics to assess the credit risk [...]

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Analytics in the call center

March 18, 2010

IBM announced an interesting new analytic product today – RAMP or Real-time Analytic Matching Platform. The idea behind this is to improve on the approaches currently used to route calls which typically rely on an availability-based approach to connect customers to agents. This doesn’t take an agent’s focus or availability nor what a customer is [...]

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First Look – SAS Real Time Decision Manager

January 19, 2010

SAS Real-Time Decision Manager (RDM) is designed for inbound communications, complementing outbound communication solutions. It aims at real-time delivery of decisions and recommendations during a customer interaction to optimize that interaction to improve revenue, growth and retention. For example, in retail banking, a customer might come in with a new job with very different income [...]

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First Look – Aha

January 14, 2010

I got a chance to catch up with Aha! recently. Aha! is based in the Denver Tech Center and was founded back in 2006. Aha!’s premise is that it is now possible to build analytics into a platform and to focus on how to operationalize predictive models and deliver analytics within business processes. Initial customers [...]

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First Look – Convergys

November 30, 2009

While I was attending the Business Rules Forum a few weeks back I got my first chance to learn about Convergys. A major sponsor of the event, Convergys is focused on improving the customer experience and customer relationships using decisioning technologies. Building on a history in customer care and billing, Convergys is now a nearly [...]

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First Look – TOA Technologies

September 9, 2009

I got a quick overview of TOA Technologies recently. TOA Technologies was founded about 5 years ago to solve “the cable guy” problem – customers waiting at home for hours without knowing when the cable guy, or any other appointment, is going to arrive. Their core idea was that they would predict, with a high [...]

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First Look – ServiceBench

June 29, 2009

I saw ServiceBench when I presented at the Warranty Chain Management Conference and got a chance to get a more detailed presentation just recently. ServiceBench is aimed at the Service Supply Chain and is now part of NEW (who also presented at the conference). The service supply chain is often very complex because of the [...]

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First Look – Oracle Real-Time Decisions 3.0

June 24, 2009

I got a chance to get an overview of the latest release of Oracle Real-Time Decisions, 3.0. This is the platform for real-time decisions on which various applications (for call center, web etc) are built and sold as part of the Oracle Applications suite.
The vision of this product is to optimize “return on attention” – [...]

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First Look – Unica

April 10, 2009

A little while ago I got an update from Unica. While Unica may seem like a slightly tangential topic for me it actually is not. Not only do I think that many efforts to adopt decision management start with customer marketing decisions (Unica’s focus as part of Enterprise Marketing Management) but Unica has done a [...]

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Quality and warranty cost reduction strategies

March 12, 2009

Jim Johnson of IBM gave IBM’s point of view on quality lifecycle management. Jim works in Global Services and works with auto and truck manufacturers. IBM’s research shows:

That warranty reserves accrue at between 1% and 3% of sales and this is continuing to increase.
Detection to correction cycles average over 100 days and can exceed 220
Electronics [...]

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Decision Management and some top CRM processes for a cost-constrained economy

January 22, 2009

A press release caught my eye recently on CRM – Gartner Identifies the Top Six CRM Marketing Processes for a Cost-Constrained Economy. Two of the six processes Gartner identified seem to me to require decision management to be done well.
1.Retention Management
Retaining high value or potential high-value customers is essential in difficult economic times. Gartner advises [...]

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Oracle’s BI Strategy

December 2, 2008

Tobin Gilman of Oracle presented on Oracle’s BI Strategy. Oracle views Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence as coming together over time and has a single strategy. They see ERP and CRM as having enabling operational efficiencies by driving a process-centric view across silos. Clearly BPM has completed this transition. Yet management processes – reporting, [...]

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Not just web personalization, extreme personalization

October 24, 2008

Tim Walters of Forrester had an interesting post this week – Is Web Personalization Now A Matter Of “Thurvival”? in which he emphasized that, even in a downturn, getting better at web personalization has a payoff. Now I think personalization is a good thing and the evidence that it results in more engagement, better results [...]

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Are your live agents helping or hurting you with customers?

October 17, 2008

Randy Saunders had a great post over on the Perfect Customer Experience -Can I please speak with a live agent? In it he has a great quote:
Forester’s study finds that 45 percent of consumers prefer to speak with a customer service agent to answer questions and resolve service issues, yet most walk away from customer [...]

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Thoughts from Chordiant’s Customer Advisory Board

October 6, 2008

Last week I was invited to attend Chordiant‘s European Customer Advisory Board. This session was held in lovely Munich in the middle of Oktoberfest and was both informative and a lot of fun. While I can’t share everything – some of it was for customers only – I thought you would appreciate what I could [...]

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Using Decision Management to power the call center of the future

August 19, 2008

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 [...]

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Warranty decisions are one reason iRobot’s outsourced call center doesn’t work as well as it should

August 13, 2008

I have been an iRobot customer since Christmas. Much as I like their products, their customer service decision making leaves a lot to be desired. This particular post was prompted by their inconsistent warranty decision management. iRobot has outsourced its call center, as many companies have, and sound like they want to deliver excellent customer [...]

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