Decision Management and Marketing – a Blog Series

Marketing is a great use case for Decision Management and we see this reflected in the  growing interest in using Decision Management Systems  to improve retention, increase cross-sell and up-sell, develop customers over time and improve customer satisfaction – key objectives of a successful marketing organization. In fact using analytics, especially predictive analytics, business rules and optimization – the core Decision Management technologies – to automate marketing decisions is probably the largest single growth area in Decision Management today. This makes perfect sense when you consider the kinds of questions marketing departments are trying to answer:

• What’s the next best action for this customer?
• What channel should I use to contact them?
• How do I retain this customer?
• Can I approve this customer’s request?
• How do I make this customer more loyal?
• How do I increase the value of this customer?
• What’s the best way to handle this problem?

All of these are ways to say “what’s the right decision for this customer at this time.” Add in the fact that marketing departments are increasingly interacting with customers in a multi-channel world and a decision-making system, a Decision Management System, is what is required.

With this in mind I am going to publish a series of blog posts on Decision Management in Marketing – Marketing Decision Management if you like – and will include First Looks for a number of marketing solutions. For this series I will focus on solutions rather than the platform technologies that I generally write about and that are covered in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies Report. Obviously you can build Marketing Decision Management systems with platform technologies but there is also a flourishing market for packaged solutions and it is these I will be including in the series.

The series will run over several weeks and as such will be interspersed with my usual posts so I’ll use the table of contents feature to tie them all together to allow you to navigate the series over time.

If you have any questions about this or anything else related to Decision Management, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Meanwhile why not think about the way your company markets to prospects and customers – what decisions might you want to take control of to improve your marketing results?