JT on EDM

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 [...]

Rachel Scales presented on Getting to the Right Price: Using BI Apps with Oracle Data Mining to Improve You Company’s Margins. Pricing is increasingly complex as the world is changing and becoming more competitive. Customer loyalties are changing, resources are constrained and competition is more global. Price management is necessary to ensure your share of [...]

Charlie Berger of Oracle presented on Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM). Charlie joined Oracle from Thinking Machines about a decade ago and have been putting machine learning algorithms into the Oracle kernel. Data Mining, in database or otherwise, sifts through data to find hidden patterns, discover new insights and make predictions. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I live in Palo Alto and a new Mountain Mike’s Pizza has just opened up near us. Much as we like MM pizza we have two problems – we like wholewheat dough and, as several members of my family are lactose/milk intolerant, soy cheese. If you have visited or live in Palo Alto you will [...]