Customer Experience

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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Decision Mangement is where CRM goes next

January 18, 2009

Elana Anderson, now at Unica, wrote a nice piece titled Where CRM Goes Next for Baseline Magazine. In a short piece she highlights some of the key challenges for CRM/Marketing going foward:

It must become more focused on interactive marketing, engaging with customers
It must break free from old habits like fixed campaign schedules and a focus [...]

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Decision Management and Campaign Management In 2020

January 5, 2009

Great post by Elana Anderson – What Will Campaign Management Be Like In 2020? « NxtERA Marketing Blog. I have long believed that improved campaign management, like improved customer experience and improved marketing, requires a greater focus on customer treatment decisions. I have blogged before about the role of decision management in campaign management (in [...]

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First Look – Sonetto Retail

December 29, 2008

I got a briefing on IVIS Group’s Sonetto product this week. Sonetto is most famous as the platform for Tesco’s multi-channel strategy. Sonetto is a product designed to focus on multi-channel operations, especially (but not exclusively) multi-channel retail. They make the very valid point that multi-channel retail is complex. Not only do retailers have multiple [...]

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Customer Centricity Strategy #3 – Mass Customization

December 17, 2008

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…

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Customer Centricity Strategy #2 – Process Integration

December 17, 2008

Continuing my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Process Integration. John describes this as focusing on cross-channel integration using Enterprise Service Bus/SOA technologies to bring data to the point of interaction. Decision management, of…

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Customer Centricity Strategy #1 – Customer Analytics

December 17, 2008

John Schmidt over on the Informatica blog had a great post on Customer Centricity that gave me a theme for three posts this week. He identified three approaches, each one of which I want to map to decision management. First…

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Microtrends and a new column in the WSJ

December 11, 2008

I worked with Kinney Zalesne back when I was speaking about decision management on the Silverlink product tour (I blogged about it here). She and Mark Penn have just started a new column in the WSJ called Microtrends (the same name as their book – Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes – which [...]

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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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1:1 Marketing works for the NHL

November 25, 2008

Interesting article on how the NHL used the power of personalization and targeting (or extreme personalization) to improve results. It does not talk about how they do this but clearly they have made things like the front cover choice for their catalog and key elements of their web presence decisions so they can make [...]

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In the coming recession put your customers first with decision management

November 20, 2008

I was pointed to a post today on the topic of customer service (Another Day, Another Customer-Service Nightmare on the EconoWhiner) that pointed out that companies
need to provide quality service and quality customer service if they’re going to survive an economic downturn as severe as this one?
Now I am not going to pick on AOL [...]

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On Best Buy’s success and being decision-centric

November 19, 2008

Last week I saw a post comparing Best Buy and Circuit City – one thriving and one going into bankruptcy – and it made me think about the role of decision management in Best Buy’s success. I have head Best Buy present various times an a number of elements of their successful customer-centricity strategy are [...]

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Using Decision Management for Customer Retention

November 10, 2008

CRM Daily had a nice little article on Customer Retention that reminded me of the example I often use for how the elements of decision management contribute to more effective customer retention decisions. Large organizations spend vast sums on retention – one bank, for instance, spends $1Bn annually – and retention is a perfect candidate [...]

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Using decision management to surive an IT squeeze

November 7, 2008

An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times – How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes:
Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can to [...]

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Treat your customers as people by managing customer treatment decisions

November 7, 2008

Great comment from monkchips on twitter today:
the key to customer relationship management is to treat your clients as people rather than accounts. everything else follows from that.
Of course the challenge is how to make sure that all the people who work for you and all the systems your clients use do this. While you can [...]

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On the importance of holistic decision making

November 6, 2008

I was chatting with someone the other day who shared a story of a European health insurer.   Their decision-making in claims looked only at the validity of the claim and nothing else. This of course created a situation where good (and very profitable customers) could be treated correctly but ineffectively – such as one [...]

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Building Blocks of Decision Management

October 30, 2008

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends:

Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just globally [...]

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Predictive Analytics Produces Business Rules That Deliver

October 29, 2008

Eric Siegel, who is chairing the new Predictive Analytics World show, presented on predictive analytics and business rules. Predictive analytics, says Eric, is a business intelligence technology that products a predictive score for each customer or prospect … and explanations thereof. These scores come from predictive models that are developed across your historical data. This [...]

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Hotwire.com Revenue Management

October 28, 2008

Darren Koch presented on Hotwire.com’s use of ILOG business rules in revenue management. Summary:

Ongoing segmentation and optimization help businesses serve customers
Smart testing + flexibility = better service = higher profits
Continues to show ROI that is increasing over time

Hotwire.com was founded in 1999 to help travel partners (who invested) sell excess inventory without driving down prices [...]

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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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