self-service

First Look – Quiterian

January 10, 2012

Quiterian is a Spanish company with offices in the US, Mexico and Europe. Quiterian Analytics aims to be complementary to traditional tools for reporting by helping companies get more value from their data sooner. In particular they aim to help companies anticipate the future by providing simple to use predictive analytics and by empowering users while [...]

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First Look – KXEN InfiniteInsight Express

December 6, 2011

KXEN has been building out a series of elements over the past few years – InfiniteInsight™Explorer to create a semantic layer to manage your data layer and create/manage an analytic dataset; InfiniteInsight™ Modeler to automate the process of building predictive analytic models; InfiniteInsight™Scorer to deploy the results of models; and InfiniteInsight™ Factory to “industrialize” or [...]

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Analytics: The widening divide. An IBM/MIT Sloan study

November 8, 2011

I listened in to IBM’s call about their recent analytics study conducted with MIT Sloan – The Widening Divide (available from www.ibm.com/thewideningdivide). This is the second year for the analytics study and surveyed 4,500 people from 30 industries and 120 countries – a very broad view. Three key results:

The competitive advantage created by analytics is [...]

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Begin with the Decision in Mind #BBCCon11

November 2, 2011

I had no slides for my session but I thought I would post my notes or outline:
I have just written a new book called Decision Management Systems about a class of system not widely deployed in organizations. They’re not new systems – I have been talking about them and helping people build them for the [...]

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First Look – Portrait Software

October 19, 2010

Portrait Software, now part of Pitney Bowes Business Insight – has a tag line of “Make every interaction count” so, with my focus on micro decisions, I wanted to get an update. Since the early days of Quadstone (acquired by Portrait some years ago) the focus of this team has been to help people get [...]

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First Look – Predixion

September 14, 2010

Predixion Software launched their new product – Predixion Insight – this week and I got a pre-launch briefing.  Founded in 2009 based in Southern California and Redmond (development team is ex-Microsoft and the chairman is ex-Datallegro), their focus is on self-service predictive analytics, delivered through the cloud and accessible via Excel.  Information workers are the [...]

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Teradata in the cloud

April 27, 2010

Dan Graham and Mike Riordan presented on Teradata’s cloud strategy. They began with a quick reminder that a cloud involves on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and pay per use. Teradata is currently testing and developing for clouds and virtualization – Teradata Express.
They are working with amazon.com’s web services team for instance [...]

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Teradata Customer Management Portfolio

April 27, 2010

Marc Schroeder presented on Teradata’s customer management portfolio – Teradata Relationship Manager (TRM).  Clearly the move to multi-channel, customer-centric customer relati0nships and the growth in data and behavioral data particularly are driving new demands in customer relationship software. Vision:
Maximize customer profitability by enabling a comprehensive interactive marketing environment that manages intelligent customer dialogs, leverages behavioral [...]

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First Look – Convergys

November 30, 2009

While I was attending the Business Rules Forum a few weeks back I got my first chance to learn about Convergys. A major sponsor of the event, Convergys is focused on improving the customer experience and customer relationships using decisioning technologies. Building on a history in customer care and billing, Convergys is now a nearly [...]

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In the coming recession put your customers first with decision management

November 20, 2008

I was pointed to a post today on the topic of customer service (Another Day, Another Customer-Service Nightmare on the EconoWhiner) that pointed out that companies
need to provide quality service and quality customer service if they’re going to survive an economic downturn as severe as this one?
Now I am not going to pick on AOL [...]

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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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Here’s how decision management delivers continuous strategy

October 14, 2008

An old colleague of mine, Vaughn Merlin, had a really interesting post this week When Strategy Becomes Continuous. It’s a great post and he makes three key points:

IT strategy is not the point – it’s all about business strategy.
Much ‘strategy’ effort is not very strategic.
Strategy formulation and execution are too loosely coupled.

He then quotes [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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How enterprises are winning with web 2.0

May 22, 2008

Jeff Hammond’s theme for this presentation is that as enterprise experiment with web 2.0 some successful adoption patterns are emerging. There are three ways to look at web 2.0:

Enabling technologies
Flex, Air, Silverlight, XML, Ajax, cloud computing
Core applications
Blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, rss, mashups built on these core technologies
Behavior shifts
Information workplaces, social computing, dynamic business applications, [...]

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Live from InterACT – Insurance in the 21st Century

April 28, 2008

After lunch I joined the Insurance track and listened to Don Light of Celent (who wrote this nice paper some time ago) and Mike Gordon of Fair Isaac. Mike started and his first slide was headlined “survival of the fittest” which seems like the right headline! There is clearly a lot on in insurance these [...]

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Live from IMPACT – Evening Activities

April 7, 2008

Evening of Monday night and its party time in the solutions area of IMPACT. Once again the wonderful string quartet were strutting their electric stuff and the food and drinks were good. I spent my time speaking to the few folks present who were really interested in decisioning (Chordiant, ILOG, select IBMers) and then went [...]

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Is your ATM a sales channel yet? And should it be?

April 4, 2008

My friends over on the Diamond Analytics blog posted an update to an old post today where they talked about some recent instances where the ATM is being used as a sales channel. Ron Shevlin had a good comment on the original post about the appropriateness of the channel given queues, screens etc. so I [...]

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Book Review – Chocolates on the pillow aren’t enough

May 8, 2007

Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience
I have just finished Jonathan Tisch’s book Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience.The author is Loews Hotels chairman and CEO and is clearly very knowledgeable about the customer experience and how to improve it.
The book has two main sections – a problem/solution [...]

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