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The folks at CNET posted “Please Get Me a Live Human: Automated Phone Menus Are the Absolute Worst” – just the latest article I have seen on this topic. They make some good points (standard way to get a human, stop talking about changed menu options, don’t suggest the website, call backs etc) but they [...]

Last quarter Mark Breading of Strategy Meets Action wrote a couple of interesting pieces – COVID-19: A tipping point for insurance digital transformation? and Will COVID-19 Be The Tipping Point for Digital Transformation? I blogged about the general sense that digital transformation is being pushed by COVID-19 last week. But Mark makes a compelling case [...]

COVID-19 is driving a new normal in which resources must be allocated and managed more dynamically.

TDWI just published a new article of mine on Moving to Real-Time Decisions (it’s in a members-only newsletter so you will need to be registered to view). When it comes to analytics, many organizations focus on using analytic insight to improve executive decision making. Yet there is often an even greater opportunity when using analytics [...]

I recently got an update from Pegasystems focused on their recent release 7 of the Pegasystems Decision Management product. Last year (2013) Pegasystems had a good year, breaking $500M in revenue while showing a 55% increase in license and backlog. They are forecasting $576M in 2014 and report particular interest in predictive analytics, analytic marketing [...]

First Look: NICE

As part of my ongoing series on Marketing Decision Management products I got an update from NICE about their real-time solutions. NICE was founded in 1986 and has 25,000 customers across 150 countries with nearly $1B in revenue. NICE’s focus is on helping their clients get closer to their customers. This involves knowing the customer [...]

A solution-focused session next with Marcus Hearne talking about analytic marketing solutions. Marketing remains focused on its traditional imperatives – how to focus on customers to maximize the value of each interaction, how to measure effectiveness, what marketing mix to use etc. However the new empowered, social consumer is putting pressure on marketing as people [...]

As part of our series on Marketing Decision Management Solutions, I got an update on SAS Real-time Decision Manager. SAS Real-time Decision Manager is a complete solution that delivers decision capabilities around customer intelligence for marketing and I was last updated on it back in 2010. The solution provides a unified capability for making customer [...]

I was struck over the weekend by this article on the BBC website – Call centre menu options catalogued by frustrated man. Essentially this guy has been documenting call center menus. As the article says “He started the project after growing frustrated about the number of options and amount of recorded information on call centre menus.” [...]

Next session for me at FICO World is one focused on where customer decisioning is going. John Rymer of Forrester began by presenting some of the major trends found in a recent Forrester survey conducted for FICO: Customer modeling is getting much more sophisticated as companies try and understand large numbers of customers more precisely [...]

As part of our ongoing series on Marketing Decision Management solutions I recently got a briefing on some of IBM’s Marketing Solutions – specifically IBM Real-time Interaction Management. IBM’s Real-time Interaction Management offering is part of IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management suite. This has been a real focus area for IBM in the last few years with [...]

I have been following the Data 2.0 Summit folks recently – the Third Annual Data 2.0 Summit 2013 in San Francisco is a one-day conference and speakers include Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, who is always worth listening to and you can get 20% off your Data 2.0 Summit pass by clicking this link. Anyway, the theme this year is that [...]

Pegasystems had good years in 2011 and 2012 they say, with Q4 2012 being particularly strong and good results from their decision management products. They have over 2,000 employees as they go into their 30th year and are targeting $500M this year. Pegasystems maintains its focus on a platform business with a number of specific [...]

I last got an update from KXEN when they launched InfiniteInsight Genius. Since then they have been rolling out cloud-based analytic applications built around their core modeling engine. In particular they have launched a new product, KXEN’s Predictive Offers, their second cloud-based predictive analytic application. KXEN has historically been focused on B2C companies, especially large [...]

I have been getting a bit behind with my blogging and tweeting recently but I was struck by a comment on Howard Dresner’s thread (@howarddresner) based on preliminary results from his survey (http://wisdomsurvey.com). #BetterDecisionMaking (so far) is the top goal for #BusinessIntelligence – wisdomsurvey.com #BIWisdom — Howard Dresner (@howarddresner) March 8, 2013 and Boris Evelson [...]

UPDATE: I wrote this review back in March but as part of the series on Marketing Decision Management I am writing about products such as the Portrait Suite so I have added it into the series. I got briefed by the Portrait folks back when they first became part of Pitney Bowes Software but it [...]

The Economist’s Schumpeter had a nice piece this week on ‘The magic of good service – Companies hope that “chief customer officers” will provide better service. Yeah, right’. The cynicism is theirs not mine. That said, cynicism about Chief Customer Officers actually improving customer service may be well founded. As the article points out a 2012 study said [...]

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 [...]

Eric Yau kicked off the business analytics keynote today, saying that they are going to focus in on the 3+3 areas discussed yesterday and with that he introduced Deepak Advani. Deepak introduced some key IT trends – rising data volumes, high volume decisions that require decision automation and LOB demanding more flexibility and independence – [...]

A number of customers participated in a panel of analytics success stories. Each one was interesting and powerful in its own right and each prompted a Decision Management suggestion for someone at that stage in developing and deploying analytics. Argos Risk is a web-based online subscription risk management service. Argos offers actionable risk insight for [...]