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 on AOL [...]

Last week I saw a post comparing Best Buy and Circuit City - one thriving and one going into bankruptcy - and it made me think about the role of decision management in Best Buy’s success. I have head Best Buy present various times an a number of elements of their successful customer-centricity strategy are [...]

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 to [...]

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 you can [...]

I was chatting with someone the other day who shared a story of a European health insurer.  Their decision-making in claims looked only at the validity of the claim and nothing else. This of course created a situation where good (and very profitable customers) could be treated correctly but ineffectively - such as one member [...]

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends:

Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just globally [...]

Eric Siegel, who is chairing the new Predictive Analytics World show, presented on predictive analytics and business rules. Predictive analytics, says Eric, is a business intelligence technology that products a predictive score for each customer or prospect … and explanations thereof. These scores come from predictive models that are developed across your historical data. This [...]

Darren Koch presented on Hotwire.com’s use of ILOG business rules in revenue management. Summary:

Ongoing segmentation and optimization help businesses serve customers
Smart testing + flexibility = better service = higher profits
Continues to show ROI that is increasing over time

Hotwire.com was founded in 1999 to help travel partners (who invested) sell excess inventory without driving down prices [...]

Tim Walters of Forrester had an interesting post this week - Is Web Personalization Now A Matter Of “Thurvival”? in which he emphasized that, even in a downturn, getting better at web personalization has a payoff. Now I think personalization is a good thing and the evidence that it results in more engagement, better results [...]