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 also felt like it deserved a post. I know I posted a whole week’s worth on using decision management to improve the customer experience but I liked this list and it reiterates some key points:

1. Act on feedback
   Not only must companies analyze feedback as part of their analytic process, they must have systems that allow them to quickly deploy changes. What good is listening to your customers complaints about a new refund approval rule if you cannot change that rule quickly?
2. Design processes from the outside in
   And think about the decisions made that decide how a customer is treated. Think too about the decisions you don’t realize you make, the hidden micro-decisions where you treat everyone the same.
3. Act as one organization to ensure consistency
   Multi-channel and multi-location is normal now so managing customer treatment decisions so that they are the same across the board is now necessary, not optional.
4. Be open
   Let customers do more for themselves, empower front-line staff to act by automating decisions and you can help with this, though it is not mostly about your systems.
5. Personalize products and experiences
   Personalization is a key benefit of using EDM to focus on customer treatment decisions.
6. Alter attitudes and employee behavior
   Pushing the right decision to employees and training them to act on it helps ensure correct and profitable decisions are taken everywhere. You may not be able to make employees empathetic but you can train them to use a script and then make sure the script is generated with the customer interaction in mind.
7. Design the complete customer experience
   Decisions too, not just processes and user interfaces.

A great list - clearly decision management is not the only solution you need but it should be part of your strategy.