JT on EDM

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 call center representative identifies a customer as “unhappy”. The recommendations help ensure that all call center representatives behave like experienced ones as well as being personalized to the customer.

There are few examples of enterprise decision management being applied outside of risk-based decisions so it is always nice to see a decision-centric approach being successfully applied to customer treatments. I think these more “growth-centric” decisions, rather than the traditional risk-centric ones, are where we are going to see more and more decision management. I also like the approach of having people help the algorithm (by identifying the mood of the customer, for instance) as this has been shown to be more successful that having the algorithm simply advise the person (see Ian Ayres work for examples).

There are datasheets and white papers on Chordiant’s offering here.