call center

First Look – Chordiant Recommendation Advisor

July 10, 2008

Chordiant announced Recommendation Advisor 6.1 today, a “real-time conversation and interaction management solution”. This Next-Best-Action engine is built on Chordiant’s Decision Management platform and designed to both improve self-service channels and support call center staff.   It uses rules and analytics to make the best recommendation and dynamically adapts during a conversation, for instance if [...]

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How to address decision making challenges – ownership

June 24, 2008

I was settling down to write some more on the issue of how to deal with various kinds of decision making problem when I remembered that I, and my friends at Big Sky Thinking, had dealt with this before. Check out this post on decision making traps and this one on whether or not experts [...]

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Stupid Systems, Bad Customer Service

February 27, 2008

BusinessWeek had a great article on customer vigilantes last week – Consumer Vigilantes. The inability of companies to provide decent customer service has become more and more of an issue in recent years. Partly this is due to off-shoring and cost-cutting, but I believe the stupidity of their information systems is even more to blame.
Most [...]

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EDM and a 21st Century Customer Experience – Wrap

January 18, 2008

Well, it’s a wrap. That’s the end of the Customer Experience posts.
Enterprise Decision Management, EDM, can be an effective tool in delivering on a true 21st Century customer experience – personalized and cost-effective customer service that builds loyalty and gets calls resolved quickly, even when they are not “calls” at all. EDM delivers value across [...]

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Using EDM to manage call center (and other) costs

January 18, 2008

While the primary focus of applying EDM to customer service should not be cost containment or reduction, there is still a role for EDM in managing costs. For instance:

With 25% churn and complex IT systems, training costs are a huge problem for call centers.
By automating decisions EDM can reduce the complexity and thus cost of [...]

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Using EDM to personalize your business

January 17, 2008

Personalizing your business is one of those things that never really seems to go out of style and that remains one of the most powerful ways to use EDM. Making a system respond in a reasonable yet personal way to a consumer or other customer is widely, and correctly, seen as a way to bring [...]

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Using EDM to keep loyalty where you want it

January 16, 2008

There are many views of loyalty but one of the most prevalent and compelling is the idea that large, multi-national, multi-channel organizations must generate the same feelings as local stores, local branches do. The sense that the people with whom you deal know you, value your business, tailor their response to you. Jim Berkowitz in [...]

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Using EDM to improve first call resolution

January 15, 2008

Continuing this week’s theme of Enterprise Decision Management or EDM in customer service, I am going to focus on one of the most important metrics in call centers – first call resolution. I saw a nice description of what this means in Tools To Improve First Call Resolution on CRM Daily:
When you call a toll-free [...]

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EDM and a 21st Century Customer Experience

January 14, 2008

Improving customer experience while adapting to the realities of the 21st century is going to be a critical skill for organizations. Customers expectations are rising, demographics are changing, business is more complex and yet the pressure to reduce costs continues unabated. There are many ways in which organizations should think about the customer experience. One [...]

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