Posts tagged as:

customer service

The Page 123 Linkfest

May 19, 2008

I discovered over the weekend that there is a game called “What’s On Page 123″ that involves bloggers tagging each other. As Ken Molay, an old friend who writes the Webinar blog tagged me I now have to post to keep it going. The deal is that you have to write about the book you [...]

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Banks, analytics and customers

May 12, 2008

Having just written a post about how vague the word analytics is, I see Ann All’s post Banks Using Analytics to Boost Customer Retention. What’s interesting about Ann’s post is not that she makes it clear what kind of analytics she is discussing but that almost any of the various kinds of analytics can [...]

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iRobot – Elite CRM, stupid returns system

April 2, 2008

This review in destinationCRM of iRobot’s automated customer service system – in which the system was given a 2008 Elite award – reminded me of an experience with a different iRobot system. iRobot’s return system is less award-worthy. Let me take you back a few months…
At Christmas I took advantage of an iRobot offer to [...]

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First Look – Chordiant Decision Management

March 27, 2008

I had a chance to talk with Rob Walker last week about Chordiant and their decision management platform. Chordiant focuses on large customers – those with lots of decisions in markets such as retail banking, consumer lending, card services, insurance and communications. Their mantra is Customer Experience Management and they aim to deliver an improvement [...]

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Book Review – The IT Value Stack

March 21, 2008

The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT LeadershipI recently finished Ade McCormack’s book, The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership. The book is aimed at a fairly high-level audience and makes a case for better integration, or “entwinement”, of technology into businesses. Ade can come across somewhat opinionated but he [...]

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Live from DAMA – Deploying Semantic Web Solutions: I’ve Built an Ontology, Now What?

March 19, 2008

Irene and Dean of TopQuadrant (a semantic web company) were up next talking about Deploying Semantic Web Solutions: I’ve Built an Ontology, Now What?
The challenges around Master Data Management have expanded as the number of information sources has exploded. Managing identify, managing semantics across a multi-faceted, distributed world is very complex. The semantic web standards [...]

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Here’s another perspective on customer experience management

March 7, 2008

This week seems to be my week for customer service lists. Earlier I posted Using decision management to hang on to your customers – a response to a list in a post on CRM Daily. Today I saw a nice post on Jim Berkowitz’s site – Gartner Outlines 7 Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience that [...]

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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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Some thoughts on designing customer interactions for a quality experience

February 13, 2008

My friend Bob Glushko and Lindsay Tabas wrote an interesting paper last year that Bob pointed out to me earlier this month – Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design. I liked the paper as it raised some interesting issues about customer interactions, in particular whether interaction design or outcomes is [...]

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How to prioritize the use of EDM in a recession

February 8, 2008

Last post in my series today – how to prioritize your use of EDM in a recession. As with any effort to prioritize EDM, the first thing to do is identify the decisions that make the difference. This means finding the micro decisions that are often hidden in your processes as well as correctly identifying [...]

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Using EDM to effectively allocate resources

February 5, 2008

Continuing my series on using EDM to manage in a recession, allocating resources effectively. In a recession resources are, almost always, constrained and so the proper and effective allocation of resources can be critical. Enterprise Decision Management, EDM, is particularly useful in allocating resources to customers. This plays out in a couple of key ways.
Firstly, [...]

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Automating “warm fuzzies”

January 22, 2008

I saw this post on CustomerThink – Automation Overkill – in which Ginny Wiedower correctly points out that automation of customer treatment can result in an impersonal feel and that customers appreciate the “warm fuzzies” that come from personal interactions. While I don’t disagree with her, there are two things worth considering. Firstly, as I [...]

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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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EDM should be a top priority for CIOs in 2008

January 9, 2008

Allan Alter over at CIO Insight had this article on CIOs Rank Their Top Priorities for 2008. Across all categories of company it was interesting that the top items were:

Delivering better service to customers
Improving business processes
Contributing to the creation of new business strategies
Cutting costs

I don’t know about you but I can see how EDM can [...]

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