Transpromotional marketing – yes, another new phrase that I heard for the first time this week. Wooing Customers in a Weak Economy was the source – an article on 1:1. Chris Stone wrote the article and it talks about the need to use different channels to contact customers and to do so consistently and in [...]
customer service
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 [...]
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 [...]
The WSJ had a little piece today on personalization – Personalized Emails Are Creepy, Not Effective based on a study done some time ago but still very relevant in today’s market where companies are being told to personalize (including by me). Here are three quotes I think summarize the problem: [there is a negative] response [...]
Three articles on loyalty caught my eye this week. First 1:1 had a nice piece on Loyalty Equals Growth for Sony. Sony is a company to which many people are already loyal so it was interesting to see that a formal loyalty program was still a priority for them. Talking about their combined CRM and [...]
[amazonify]0470189088:right[/amazonify][amazonify]0470189088::text::::The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs[/amazonify] 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 [...]
I was settling down to write some more on the issue of how to deal with various kinds of decision making problem when I remembered that I, and my friends at Big Sky Thinking, had dealt with this before. Check out this post on decision making traps and this one on whether or not experts [...]
David Greer had a cutely named post this week – The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications – it [...]
I discovered over the weekend that there is a game called “What’s On Page 123” that involves bloggers tagging each other. As Ken Molay, an old friend who writes the Webinar blog tagged me I now have to post to keep it going. The deal is that you have to write about the book you [...]
Having just written a post about how vague the word analytics is, I see Ann All’s post Banks Using Analytics to Boost Customer Retention. What’s interesting about Ann’s post is not that she makes it clear what kind of analytics she is discussing but that almost any of the various kinds of analytics can and [...]
This review in destinationCRM of iRobot’s automated customer service system – in which the system was given a 2008 Elite award – reminded me of an experience with a different iRobot system. iRobot’s return system is less award-worthy. Let me take you back a few months… At Christmas I took advantage of an iRobot offer [...]
I had a chance to talk with Rob Walker last week about Chordiant and their decision management platform. Chordiant focuses on large customers – those with lots of decisions in markets such as retail banking, consumer lending, card services, insurance and communications. Their mantra is Customer Experience Management and they aim to deliver an improvement [...]
[amazonify]0470018534:right[/amazonify][amazonify]0470018534::text::::The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership[/amazonify]I recently finished Ade McCormack’s book, The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership. The book is aimed at a fairly high-level audience and makes a case for better integration, or “entwinement”, of technology into businesses. Ade can come across somewhat opinionated but he [...]
Irene and Dean of TopQuadrant (a semantic web company) were up next talking about Deploying Semantic Web Solutions: I’ve Built an Ontology, Now What? The challenges around Master Data Management have expanded as the number of information sources has exploded. Managing identify, managing semantics across a multi-faceted, distributed world is very complex. The semantic web [...]
This week seems to be my week for customer service lists. Earlier I posted Using decision management to hang on to your customers – a response to a list in a post on CRM Daily. Today I saw a nice post on Jim Berkowitz’s site – Gartner Outlines 7 Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience that [...]
BusinessWeek had a great article on customer vigilantes last week – Consumer Vigilantes. The inability of companies to provide decent customer service has become more and more of an issue in recent years. Partly this is due to off-shoring and cost-cutting, but I believe the stupidity of their information systems is even more to blame. [...]
My friend Bob Glushko and Lindsay Tabas wrote an interesting paper last year that Bob pointed out to me earlier this month – Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design. I liked the paper as it raised some interesting issues about customer interactions, in particular whether interaction design or outcomes is [...]
Last post in my series today – how to prioritize your use of EDM in a recession. As with any effort to prioritize EDM, the first thing to do is identify the decisions that make the difference. This means finding the micro decisions that are often hidden in your processes as well as correctly identifying [...]
Continuing my series on using EDM to manage in a recession, allocating resources effectively. In a recession resources are, almost always, constrained and so the proper and effective allocation of resources can be critical. Enterprise Decision Management, EDM, is particularly useful in allocating resources to customers. This plays out in a couple of key ways. [...]
I saw this post on CustomerThink – Automation Overkill – in which Ginny Wiedower correctly points out that automation of customer treatment can result in an impersonal feel and that customers appreciate the “warm fuzzies” that come from personal interactions. While I don’t disagree with her, there are two things worth considering. Firstly, as I [...]
