consumer

First Look – Zoot

February 9, 2012

Zoot was founded in 1990 and has been providing hosted decision management solutions since 1992. With a focus on financial services, Zoot’s clients include 3 of the top 5 U.S. banks and they work with clients of all sizes and across all lines of business.  Instant credit decisioning is one of their critical offerings, but [...]

Read the full article →

Giving retail banking customers what they want

January 2, 2012

Jim Davis of SAS had an interesting post back in October - What do retail banking customers want?- in which he talked about the results of some consumer surveys and the banking industry’s response. The three results Jim discussed were clarity and fairness, easy access and quality customer experience. Interestingly I see all three of these [...]

Read the full article →

Predictive Modeling Tools for Analytic Teams #FICOWorld

November 3, 2011

The other session I got to see at FICO World was a panel discussion on analytic modeling tools with representatives from UniCredit (Italy), Ferratum (Finland), Nedbank (South Africa), and Citi.
Challenges and rewards of building an analytic modeling team

Always start from scratch with fresh, inexperienced teams and this is both challenging and rewarding
Challenges are personal and [...]

Read the full article →

Adaptive Control in Collections at a US Regional Bank #FICOWorld

November 3, 2011

Time for a quick session or two at FICO World. Chip Clarke and Andrew Beckman presented on the use of customer-level TRIAD to continuously improve their collection results for their retail banking products – to do “Adaptive Control”. Adaptive control, for those not familiar with the term, means continually challenging the way you make decisions [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Causata

August 11, 2011

Causata is a software company founded in early 2009 with a heritage from the online space – behavioral targeting on the web and database marketing. They are headquartered here in Silicon Valley with engineering in London and the team has experience across companies like Touch Clarity, Omniture, Interwoven, DoubleClick, RedHat, Skype, eBay and others.
Causata sees [...]

Read the full article →

Social Media Analytics with IBM

June 2, 2011

IBM sees Social Media Analytics as part of Customer Analytics rather than as a separate category – the reason for analyzing social media is to better understand customers and what they are thinking. It is not enough, says IBM, to understand and analyze social media. This understanding must be integrated with other kinds of analytics [...]

Read the full article →

Operational Intelligence Panel

April 29, 2011

A panel of customers (TXU Energy, Pfizer, NY State Dept Taxation and Finance – one of my favorite Decision Management stories and included in this white paper for instance) discussed how to link processes to performance management with Daryl Plummer  of Gartner and the folks from ebizQ. No attempt to make a coherent story, just [...]

Read the full article →

Leveraging customer data to drive business decisions

April 5, 2011

Interesting panel with folks from the Venetian, Marriott and Nextag discussing customer intelligence. First they were asked about their use of analytics:

Nextag is an online comparison shopping engine that assembles data from 10,000 merchants online for consumers. They make money by buying clicks on search engines and then getting payments from merchants for referrals. The [...]

Read the full article →

SAP Run Better Tour – Geoffrey Moore

February 23, 2011

After yesterday’s sneak peak the BI 4 launch event – the “Run Better Tour” – kicked off this morning with the main tent event. Geoffrey Moore focused on changes in enterprise IT – specifically the move from what he calls systems of record to “systems of engagement” driven by the consumerization of IT. Enterprise IT [...]

Read the full article →

Analytics and the art of selling

November 23, 2010

I saw this interesting McKinsey piece recently – Rediscovering the art of selling – McKinsey Quarterly – Retail & Consumer Goods – Strategy & Analysis – and I was struck by the value of analytics in this context. What retailers really need to do, according to McKinsey, is focus on hiring sales people with personality, [...]

Read the full article →

Happy world statistics day!

October 20, 2010

It turns out that today is World Statistics Day (according to my friends at SAS, who have a page all about it). The focus of the day is on the value of official statistics. So, if you are working for a governmental or non-governmental statistics organization, have a nice day
If you don’t work [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Runa

October 12, 2010

Runa was founded a couple of years ago to solve the problem of very low conversion rates on most e-commerce websites. Companies spend lots of money driving people to their websites but only 2-3% convert to buyers. One of the biggest reasons for this is shopping cart abandonment – people put goods in their cart [...]

Read the full article →

Customer intimacy #bas2010

September 29, 2010

Customer intimacy is a hot topic these days. Customers are getting more complex because not only are they using multiple channels but because they have multiple online personalities – work, home, on behalf of a parent or child and so on. The fact that consumers trust each other (78%) but not ads (13% trust for [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Experian hosted decisioning solutions

May 24, 2010

I got a quick update from Roger Ahern at Experian recently. Roger runs a recently founded group focused on hosted decisioning applications. Experian also has a Decision Analytics group with teams handling software (their Strategy ManagementSM and ProbeSM products), fraud products (like Precise IDSM) and Decision Sciences (custom analytic models and related services).  Experian’s Credit [...]

Read the full article →

Smart meters need smart systems, not a better user interface

May 19, 2010

This article on CNET caught my eye this morning: Study: Smart meters need better user interface. I am always interested in smart meter stories as it has always struck me that this is a powerful way to reduce energy usage with all the long term benefits for consumers and producers this entails. I am often [...]

Read the full article →

Decision engines in financial services

April 26, 2010

This is a piece I wrote for Chris Pratt’s quarterly financial institutions newsletter
The use of technology to automate and manage decisions, especially high volume decisions essential to day-to-day operational execution, is expanding rapidly. Beginning with the consumer credit business, use of decision engines and decision management has spread to all aspects of financial services [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Guest intelligence at Target

April 12, 2010

Guest intelligence is something Target use to drive marketing and merchandising decisions. Target, of course, is a large US retailer that does business in 49 states and has a major web presence. Target has guest data from panel surveys,  store surveys and operational data and regards these all as valid sources of guest data, without [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – eBureau

February 22, 2010

eBureau is a predictive scoring and information service provider founded in 2004, focused on technology for very rapid model development and deployment. Using their own purpose-built modeling software, a small group of modelers developed 900 predictive models in 2009 alone. The company has been applying this capability for real-time and interactive marketing like contact centers, [...]

Read the full article →

Context-Aware computing needs Decision Management

November 6, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
In a press release just over a month ago, Gartner said that Context-Aware Computing will provide significant competitive advantage. As the press releases says:
Gartner defines context-aware computing as the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction. Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes, [...]

Read the full article →