Posts tagged as:

customer service

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience

October 30, 2008

Two gentlemen from Deloitte presented Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience. 80% of healthcare costs are incurred by 20% of members and traditionally the 20% get all the focus. Analytics and data mining get applied to claims, authorization, costs as a result. Segmentation focuses on the unprofitable and unhealthy. Increasingly [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

From Scores to Strategies

September 23, 2008

The use of analytics in business decisions, presented by one of InfoCentricity’s customers, was next. In many organizations modelers are busy building predictive models that they then throw over the wall to a business analyst. To bridge this gap you need a collaboration platform that allows modelers to do their thing while allowing business analysts [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Here’s why decision management matters to mobile marketing

August 21, 2008

Ginger Conlon had a little piece on mobile marketing that caught my eye. This post highlighted the growing importance of mobile devices as both a customer support channel and as a marketing vehicle. I completely agree with this assessment but I think it means that, for both customer service and marketing, we will have to [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Transpromotional marketing with EDM

July 18, 2008

Transpromotional marketing – yes, another new phrase that I heard for the first time this week. Wooing Customers in a Weak Economy was the source – an article on 1:1. Chris Stone wrote the article and it talks about the need to use different channels to contact customers and to do so consistently and in [...]

Read the full article →

Is Self-Service good or bad?

July 18, 2008

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe had a column “Self-serve and slave” (that I saw in the San Jose Mercury News as “In a self-serve nation, work gets dumped on us“) in which she rails against self-service and compares it to the outsourcing of work from paid employees to us consumers. As she says:
For every [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Don’t be creepy when you personalize

July 3, 2008

The WSJ had a little piece today on personalization – Personalized Emails Are Creepy, Not Effective based on a study done some time ago but still very relevant in today’s market where companies are being told to personalize (including by me). Here are three quotes I think summarize the problem:
[there is a negative] response to [...]

Read the full article →

Using decision management to build loyalty and grow

July 3, 2008

Three articles on loyalty caught my eye this week. First 1:1 had a nice piece on Loyalty Equals Growth for Sony. Sony is a company to which many people are already loyal so it was interesting to see that a formal loyalty program was still a priority for them. Talking about their combined CRM and [...]

Read the full article →

Book Review – The Best Service is No Service

July 1, 2008

The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs
I just finished reading The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs and I can’t recommend it too highly.
This is a tremendous book laying [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

The power and challenges of decision management packages

June 8, 2008

David Greer had a cutely named post this week – The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications – it [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →