customer service

With the kick off this week of my blog series on Marketing Decision Management I thought I would highlight a white paper relevant to this topic. If you are interested in using Decision Management to improve marketing and treat customers right, check out this white paper on Managing the Next Best Activity Decision  sponsored by KXEN – No matter [...]

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 saw this list of Top 10 CIO Business and Technology Priorities in 2013 from Gartner the other day and it caught my eye. In particular I was struck by the potential for Decision Management to impact both business and technology priorities on this list. Obviously one can tie almost anything to a priority like “Increasing [...]

Listening to Marketplace yesterday I heard a piece on AT&T’s new “video bills.” Now I am sure this sounds cute to the folks in the AT&T marketing department and you can just hear the conversation can’t you? Someone points out that people hate their bills, that the customer service people are deluged with people calling who [...]

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 [...]

IBM made a big announcement about Decision Management today. They are marking what they see as a new era of computing, cognitive computing that allows us to build systems that learn and, in my words, make decisions. All these new technologies, analytics and more, are about making better decisions. As Mike Rodin put it, the [...]

There was an interesting little article on the Institute of Financial Operations site last week – In relentless pursuit of productivity: Index tracks traits of best-in-breed AP operations. This reported on some results from the Accounts Payable Productivity Index study. What struck me about this was the role of automated decision-making (using business rules) among [...]

I have been speaking at a series of IBM events last fall and this spring focused on “Improving customer service with BPM and decision management“. The third is in New York, NY on March 21st and the main session starts at 9am ET. I will be kicking off the session with “BPM and Decision Management [...]

I have recently finished a new white paper on Managing the Next Best Activity Decision, sponsored by KXEN. Every interaction with your customers is an opportunity to build your relationship. It could be a personalized marketing offer or proactive customer service. To make sure this interaction maximizes the value of your customer relationship, many organizations are [...]

I am giving a webinar with KXEN on January 24th at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern on Next Best Activity decisions Every interaction with your customers is an opportunity to build your relationship. It could be a personalized marketing offer or proactive customer service. To make sure this interaction maximizes the value of your customer relationship, many [...]

Meri Gruber, VP Biz Dev here at Decision Management Solutions, had a post a little while ago that she recently tweeted – How many service reps does it take to change a light bulb or lose a customer? In it she makes the point that a company lost her business because the customer service department [...]

I am speaking at a series of IBM events this fall and next spring focused on “Improving customer service with BPM and decision management“. The second is in San Jose, CA on December 8th and the main session starts at 9am PT. I will be kicking off the session with “BPM and Decision Management for [...]

I am speaking at a serious of IBM events this fall and next spring focused on “Improving customer service with BPM and decision management“. The first is in Reston, VA on December 6th and the main session starts at 9am ET. I will be kicking off the session with “BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, [...]

My new book – Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics – is officially shipping – you can now order it (rather than pre-order it) at IBMPressbooks.com, at amazon.com or at InformIT. Build Systems That Work Actively to Help You Maximize Growth and Profits Most companies rely on operational systems [...]

IBM clearly realizes that people, process and technology all must go together to deliver value. This means that clients need both software and services and was the subject of this next session. Business Analytics and Optimization is a segment that crosses hardware, software and services at IBM. IBM is committed to growing this business from [...]

IBM has recently announced a new strategy for bringing Big Data to the enterprise. In particular this includes InfoSphere Streams v2 (announced April 12) and InfoSphere BigInsights 1.1 announced today. Big Data is an issue, of course, largely because the amount of data available to organizations is growing rapidly. Surveys show that many managers already [...]

I am giving a webinar on Automating Business Rules: Avoiding 3 Common Pitfalls with Corticon on June 7 at 11am Pacific. Automating business rules enables organizations to make better, faster decisions.  Tremendous business gains can be achieved by improving productivity and customer service and by adapting quickly to changing market conditions. All too often however, [...]

I got an invite to a webinar on this topic the other day. The invite had some questions for you to ask yourself about your call center agents and how effective they would be if: They could act the way you wanted them to every time They didn’t have to have post-its or cheat sheets [...]

A panel of customers (TXU Energy, Pfizer, NY State Dept Taxation and Finance – one of my favorite Decision Management stories and included in this white paper for instance) discussed how to link processes to performance management with Daryl Plummer  of Gartner and the folks from ebizQ. No attempt to make a coherent story, just [...]