Customer Experience

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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Evidence-based (decision-centric) CRM Processes

October 22, 2008

Graham Hill wrote a piece on Evidence-based CRM that focused on evidence-based CRM programs and it made me think about evidence-based CRM processes.
To me, evidence-based CRM means customer relationships, and thus customer treatments, that are based on evidence (data) and not judgment, hope, guesswork etc. It means

making offers that you have evidence this customer will [...]

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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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First Look – Chordiant’s Visual Business Director

October 15, 2008

Today Chordiant announced their new Visual Business Director (CxVBD). I saw an early prototype of this some months back and got a more detailed look at the finished product at their recent Customer Advisory Board. I really like CxVBD as I think it shows the critical business value of externalizing decisions. I have yet to [...]

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First Look – SeeWhy

October 7, 2008

On my recent trip to Europe I got my first chance for a real look at SeeWhy’s product and their announcement today of SeeWhy Tracks Individual Customers’ Digital Mood seemed like a good reason to blog a little about this interesting product. The latest version helps manage customer experience by analyzing page errors, page load [...]

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Live from the SOA Symposium – Opening Keynotes

October 7, 2008

The SOA Symposium started today in the AJAX Stadium in Amsterdam. The opening keynotes were actually in the Stadium itself – we all sat at the halfway line. Thomas Erl and Sandy Carter gave quick intros and I will add some comments later but I could not type so this is just a placeholder have [...]

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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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Collections Best Practices

September 23, 2008

Jeff Bernstein of Strategem Portfolio Services gave an overview of the latest developments in collections. Jeff’s company has a product called Strategy Director (about which I blogged before). Jeff does a lot of work with collections groups and all too often sees a failure to implement analytics even where those analytic models are being developed [...]

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Segmentation and product design

September 18, 2008

Scott had a great article on segmentation and personas this week that is a nice, quick read. I think the use of analytics in persona design can make a big difference (as I have noted before) and that decision management can use good customer segmentation as a first step towards extreme personalization.
If you are not [...]

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Making decisions about loyalty programs

September 16, 2008

1:1 had a nice piece on the growing role of loyalty programs in retail. This noted the “Growing sophistication in loyalty programs” among retailers and, in particular, the use of loyalty program data not just to calculate lifetime customer value but also to build competitive advantage. This second aspect is the one I always find [...]

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As content on demand grows, so must decision management

September 10, 2008

The Conference Board recently announced strong growth in online content or content-on-demand. The press release can be summarized by this comment:
Fundamentally, consumers expect content to be available when they want it, and on the screen of their choice
This, of course, creates both a challenge and an opportunity for those providing content. The challenge is that [...]

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Predictive Marketing (Lessons from the CMO Summit #3)

September 9, 2008

Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]

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Multi-Channel Marketing (Lessons from the CMO Summit #2)

September 8, 2008

My second set of thoughts were prompted by notes on a presentation by the CMO of Walmart.com, Cathy Halligan. She began by noting that they no longer see a digital divide   – there is a big percentage overlap between their online and offline shoppers.In addition, online activities are increasingly influencing offline purchase patterns [...]

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Next generation direct marketing with decision management

August 26, 2008

Elana Anderson had a great post on direct marketing while I was on vacation -Next Generation Campaign  Management.
She starts off with three great principles:

Listen to all information provided by customers and prospects – both explicit and implied.
Understand past and present information to determine the best possible marketing action.
Communicate in a compelling, timely, and relevant manner.

All [...]

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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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Here’s one way to institutionalize great service

August 18, 2008

David Rance had a nice piece on CustomerThink called Great Service Has to Be Institutionalized if It Is to Become the Norm. In this post he identifies decision making as important, which I think is true. Now his focus is on culture (very important) but mine is different. What if you used your systems to [...]

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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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If you were making a “3-minute promise” would your systems help or hurt?

July 25, 2008

The folks at CustServ had a piece on The 3-Minute Promise to Avis Customers that made me think. If you wanted to make a similar promise – that some process of yours would be quick, efficient, flawless and seamless – would the systems you have help you or hurt you?

Would your systems be able to [...]

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Analytics turn data into opportunity (article)

July 21, 2008

Ed Garry of Oracle wrote a piece for Wall Street and Technology called Analytics Help Firms Turn Data Into Opportunity that I found last week. In it Ed talks about Real Time Decisioning platforms that “deliver both rules and predictive analytics to power solutions for real-time enterprise decision management”. Ed is, of course, correct though [...]

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