Insurers face an explosion of direct sales channels: websites, mobile and call centers, with the rapidly evolving world of social media opening up even more opportunities. Driving consistent customer treatments and profitable direct sales across dynamic distribution channels, while effectively managing risk, is a huge challenge. As Deb pointed out, linking all customer communication together [...]
customer treatment
Portrait Software, now part of Pitney Bowes Business Insight – has a tag line of “Make every interaction count” so, with my focus on micro decisions, I wanted to get an update. Since the early days of Quadstone (acquired by Portrait some years ago) the focus of this team has been to help people get [...]
I just scheduled and announced four new webinars for this fall: Simplifying over-complex processes Delivering customer centricity across multiple channels, multiple platforms Implementing analytics? You need business rules Decision analytics – more than BI and web analytics You can find all my upcoming events in the Events Calendar.
Organizations have multiple channels for interacting with their customers. Each channel has its own platform for valid technical reasons. And each line of business has its own systems while customer data is spread across multiple databases. To deliver customer centricity, organizations need to connect these elements effectively. At the heart of effective customer interactions are [...]
Syndicated from ebizQ William Band at Forrester (@waband) recently tweeted that his next research project was: When to use CRM apps vs BPM tools to improve customer interactions? Pros & Cons of each? I replied that companies should be sure to manage customer treatment decisions too and he asked me to expand on that thought. [...]
This is a piece I wrote for Chris Pratt’s quarterly financial institutions newsletter The use of technology to automate and manage decisions, especially high volume decisions essential to day-to-day operational execution, is expanding rapidly. Beginning with the consumer credit business, use of decision engines and decision management has spread to all aspects of financial services [...]
The news today is that Pegasystems (rules-based business process management) is acquiring Chordiant (decision-centric CRM). This is interesting news as it merges a company (Chordiant) with a very decision-centric/decision services separate from process mindset with one (Pega) that has mixed rules and process together much more. Chordiant have been one of my companies to watch [...]
TRIAD 8.5 has just been released and is the latest version of FICO’s combined account manager and customer manager platform for financial services companies (its focus is on accounts/customers where credit risk is a critical issue). I got an update recently focused on Decision Graph. Decision Graph is one of the new capabilities. Decision Graph [...]
SAS Real-Time Decision Manager (RDM) is designed for inbound communications, complementing outbound communication solutions. It aims at real-time delivery of decisions and recommendations during a customer interaction to optimize that interaction to improve revenue, growth and retention. For example, in retail banking, a customer might come in with a new job with very different income [...]
Neeraj asked me an interesting question the other day – how would a decisioning product like Oracle RTD and a business rules engine co-exist? Rather than answering this specifically I thought I would try and generalize it. After all there are products like Unica and Chordiant that also offer decisioning engines that are not general [...]
Syndicated from ebizQ So you’re the CIO of a Fortune 500 company and you step into an elevator with your CEO. He asks why the board should approve your seven figure Decision Management budget request. What’s your “elevator pitch” for decisioning? Is it that decisioning can change the basic assumptions of your business – decoupling [...]
I wrote an article on customer decisioning – To Focus on Your Customer, Focus on Your Decisions – in Frost & Sullivan‘s Customer Contact eBulletin. Enjoy
A little while ago I got an update from Unica. While Unica may seem like a slightly tangential topic for me it actually is not. Not only do I think that many efforts to adopt decision management start with customer marketing decisions (Unica’s focus as part of Enterprise Marketing Management) but Unica has done a [...]
Wrapping up my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Mass Customization. John describes this as managing trade-offs and building sophisticated models to customize your response to each and every customer based on their value…
Continuing my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Process Integration. John describes this as focusing on cross-channel integration using Enterprise Service Bus/SOA technologies to bring data to the point of interaction. Decision management, of…
Tobin Gilman of Oracle presented on Oracle’s BI Strategy. Oracle views Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence as coming together over time and has a single strategy. They see ERP and CRM as having enabling operational efficiencies by driving a process-centric view across silos. Clearly BPM has completed this transition. Yet management processes – reporting, [...]
I was pointed to a post today on the topic of customer service (Another Day, Another Customer-Service Nightmare on the EconoWhiner) that pointed out that companies need to provide quality service and quality customer service if they’re going to survive an economic downturn as severe as this one? Now I am not going to pick [...]
CRM Daily had a nice little article on Customer Retention that reminded me of the example I often use for how the elements of decision management contribute to more effective customer retention decisions. Large organizations spend vast sums on retention – one bank, for instance, spends $1Bn annually – and retention is a perfect candidate [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
