IVR

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 [...]

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Analytics and IVRs

April 5, 2010

As regular readers know, IVRs are one of my pet peeves. Not because I want them all to have a button for a human but because I want them to be smart. I want them to use what they know about me to tailor the options, to predict what I am likely to do and [...]

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Analytics in the call center

March 18, 2010

IBM announced an interesting new analytic product today – RAMP or Real-time Analytic Matching Platform. The idea behind this is to improve on the approaches currently used to route calls which typically rely on an availability-based approach to connect customers to agents. This doesn’t take an agent’s focus or availability nor what a customer is [...]

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How can decision management help with customer engagement?

July 30, 2009

Shantanu Narayen of Adobe recently said “Engagement is the new business mandate” and when Denise Shiffman (author of The Age of Engage) spoke at a recent CMO summit she added:
As I talk to customers, partners, and employees, it becomes increasingly clear to me that the health of a company relies on the extent to which [...]

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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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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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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 [...]

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First Look – Strategy Director

July 1, 2008

One of the things I like to do on the blog is bring attention to those companies applying the principles of Enterprise Decision Management to deliver useful, smart enough systems. I recently came across Strategy DirectorTM from Stratagem Portfolio Services. This uses EDM to deliver analytics and strategy support for collections.
The product is built on [...]

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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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