IVR

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 [...]

As part of our ongoing series on Marketing Decision Management solutions, I got an update from [24]7 recently. Based in Campbell, [24]7 was founded back in 2001 and is focused on helping companies deliver an intuitive customer experience. Still privately held, they were originally focused on managing contact centers, but for several years their primary [...]

I got an update from Convergys on their real-time decisioning engine recently. Convergys is a services company with 75,000 customer management employees across 69 contact centers around the world. They provide contact center outsourcing, technologies for customer contact centers and customer experience analytics. Convergys’ technologies are designed to support contact centers, covering IVR, campaign management, [...]

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.” [...]

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 [...]

As regular readers know, IVRs are one of my pet peeves. Not because I want them all to have a button for a human but because I want them to be smart. I want them to use what they know about me to tailor the options, to predict what I am likely to do and [...]

IBM announced an interesting new analytic product today – RAMP or Real-time Analytic Matching Platform. The idea behind this is to improve on the approaches currently used to route calls which typically rely on an availability-based approach to connect customers to agents. This doesn’t take an agent’s focus or availability nor what a customer is [...]

Shantanu Narayen of Adobe recently said “Engagement is the new business mandate” and when Denise Shiffman (author of The Age of Engage) spoke at a recent CMO summit she added: As I talk to customers, partners, and employees, it becomes increasingly clear to me that the health of a company relies on the extent to [...]

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 [...]

David Rance had a nice piece on CustomerThink called Great Service Has to Be Institutionalized if It Is to Become the Norm. In this post he identifies decision making as important, which I think is true. Now his focus is on culture (very important) but mine is different. What if you used your systems to [...]

[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 [...]

One of the things I like to do on the blog is bring attention to those companies applying the principles of Enterprise Decision Management to deliver useful, smart enough systems. I recently came across Strategy DirectorTM from Stratagem Portfolio Services. This uses EDM to deliver analytics and strategy support for collections. The product is built [...]

While the primary focus of applying EDM to customer service should not be cost containment or reduction, there is still a role for EDM in managing costs. For instance: With 25% churn and complex IT systems, training costs are a huge problem for call centers. By automating decisions EDM can reduce the complexity and thus [...]

Personalizing your business is one of those things that never really seems to go out of style and that remains one of the most powerful ways to use EDM. Making a system respond in a reasonable yet personal way to a consumer or other customer is widely, and correctly, seen as a way to bring [...]