An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times – How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes: Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can [...]
Customer Experience
Great comment from monkchips on twitter today: the key to customer relationship management is to treat your clients as people rather than accounts. everything else follows from that. Of course the challenge is how to make sure that all the people who work for you and all the systems your clients use do this. While [...]
I was chatting with someone the other day who shared a story of a European health insurer. Their decision-making in claims looked only at the validity of the claim and nothing else. This of course created a situation where good (and very profitable customers) could be treated correctly but ineffectively – such as one [...]
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 [...]
Eric Siegel, who is chairing the new Predictive Analytics World show, presented on predictive analytics and business rules. Predictive analytics, says Eric, is a business intelligence technology that products a predictive score for each customer or prospect … and explanations thereof. These scores come from predictive models that are developed across your historical data. This [...]
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 [...]
Tim Walters of Forrester had an interesting post this week – Is Web Personalization Now A Matter Of “Thurvival”? in which he emphasized that, even in a downturn, getting better at web personalization has a payoff. Now I think personalization is a good thing and the evidence that it results in more engagement, better results [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Today Chordiant announced their new Visual Business Director (CxVBD). I saw an early prototype of this some months back and got a more detailed look at the finished product at their recent Customer Advisory Board. I really like CxVBD as I think it shows the critical business value of externalizing decisions. I have yet to [...]
On my recent trip to Europe I got my first chance for a real look at SeeWhy’s product and their announcement today of SeeWhy Tracks Individual Customers’ Digital Mood seemed like a good reason to blog a little about this interesting product. The latest version helps manage customer experience by analyzing page errors, page load [...]
The SOA Symposium started today in the AJAX Stadium in Amsterdam. The opening keynotes were actually in the Stadium itself – we all sat at the halfway line. Thomas Erl and Sandy Carter gave quick intros and I will add some comments later but I could not type so this is just a placeholder have [...]
Last week I was invited to attend Chordiant‘s European Customer Advisory Board. This session was held in lovely Munich in the middle of Oktoberfest and was both informative and a lot of fun. While I can’t share everything – some of it was for customers only – I thought you would appreciate what I could [...]
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 [...]
Scott had a great article on segmentation and personas this week that is a nice, quick read. I think the use of analytics in persona design can make a big difference (as I have noted before) and that decision management can use good customer segmentation as a first step towards extreme personalization. If you are [...]
1:1 had a nice piece on the growing role of loyalty programs in retail. This noted the “Growing sophistication in loyalty programs” among retailers and, in particular, the use of loyalty program data not just to calculate lifetime customer value but also to build competitive advantage. This second aspect is the one I always find [...]
The Conference Board recently announced strong growth in online content or content-on-demand. The press release can be summarized by this comment: Fundamentally, consumers expect content to be available when they want it, and on the screen of their choice This, of course, creates both a challenge and an opportunity for those providing content. The challenge [...]
Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]
st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} My second set of thoughts were prompted by notes on a presentation by the CMO of Walmart.com, Cathy Halligan. She began by noting that they no longer see a [...]
Elana Anderson had a great post on direct marketing while I was on vacation –Next Generation Campaign Management. She starts off with three great principles: Listen to all information provided by customers and prospects – both explicit and implied. Understand past and present information to determine the best possible marketing action. Communicate in a compelling, [...]
