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 [...]

Some time ago I saw an article that discussed the 8Ps (4 old, 4 new) of Marketing. It seemed to me that decision making, especially operational/transactional decision making is critical to most of these Ps. Here, then, is my summary of the 8Ps and why decisions, and decision management, matter.
4 Ps

Product
You might think that [...]

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 [...]

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 was settling down to write some more on the issue of how to deal with various kinds of decision making problem when I remembered that I, and my friends at Big Sky Thinking, had dealt with this before. Check out this post on decision making traps and this one on whether or not experts [...]

I have just finished reading Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Groundswell is a great book providing a thorough and up to date discussion of how to use social media, and more, to connect with and energize your customers. The book approaches the discussion from the reader’s objectives - listening to customers, [...]

Some time ago the folks over at the Analytical Engine had a post about Data Driven Persona Development. I loved the way they described taking a very qualitative approach - persona development - and adding some analytic rigor to it. Given my interest in using analytics for segmentation and in developing different websites/experiences for different [...]

One of the most fun things we did in the book was write about real success stories. We used an “Old Way” v “EDM Way” model for these. In the past I have written some blog posts using a similar style and today I have a new one.
Old Way
An online pharmacy (that the country trusts, [...]