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 to [...]

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 [...]

Reading 1:1 today I saw a great story about Gulf Bank called Overcoming Customer Interaction Roadblocks. This bank has a problem because it’s customers can’t get mail. How does it address this? By using it’s ATMs as a delivery device for messages! Putting relevant, timely, personalized information on the ATM when you use it. No [...]

Neil and I caught up with Expert System, a Semantic Intelligence company, last week to discuss their Cogito product. Expert System is based in Italy, has 145 employees and originally worked on spell checkers for Microsoft. While they have a lot of business in Europe they are now growing in the US. Their core pitch [...]

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 book laying out a systematic approach for better customer service. Predicated on the idea that customers want your product to “just [...]

I am a firm believer in getting the technology for decision management into the hands of those who might use it - I often feel that people just don’t understand what’s possible. The folks over at ILOG have been offering a 6 month JRules trial since last fall. This full version has everything but the [...]

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 on [...]

I have often posted on the need to combine decision management and process management but it seemed to me that recently I have seen more BPM writers talking about this. For instance the folks over on the ARIS blog posted BPM + BRM = Greater than the Sum of the Parts (talking about a webinar [...]

Ade McCormack, author of The IT Value Stack (reviewed previously) and columnist at the FT in England, just reviewed the book for this blog. You can read his review of Smart (Enough) Systems over on his blog.

I got a walkthrough of Corticon’s Business Rules product last week - the first time I have discussed it in a while. Version 5 has some interesting features. The Business Rules Foundation is a set of headless services, designed to support a variety of development tools, UI frameworks and metaphors along with a variety of [...]