Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]

Elana Anderson had a great post on direct marketing while I was on vacation -Next Generation Campaign Management.
She starts off with three great principles:

Listen to all information provided by customers and prospects — both explicit and implied.
Understand past and present information to determine the best possible marketing action.
Communicate in a compelling, timely, and relevant manner.

All of [...]

Chris Skinner wrote a nice little piece on the Future Call Center over on the swift community. He had some nice examples, though he was focused on how the future call center might be using video. What struck me, though, was that decision making is critical to his example. Neither the avatar nor the video-linked [...]

David Rance had a nice piece on CustomerThink called Great Service Has to Be Institutionalized if It Is to Become the Norm. In this post he identifies decision making as important, which I think is true. Now his focus is on culture (very important) but mine is different. What if you used your systems to [...]

I have been an iRobot customer since Christmas. Much as I like their products, their customer service decision making leaves a lot to be desired. This particular post was prompted by their inconsistent warranty decision management. iRobot has outsourced its call center, as many companies have, and sound like they want to deliver excellent customer [...]

The folks at CustServ had a piece on The 3-Minute Promise to Avis Customers that made me think. If you wanted to make a similar promise - that some process of yours would be quick, efficient, flawless and seamless - would the systems you have help you or hurt you?

Would your systems be able to [...]

Ed Garry of Oracle wrote a piece for Wall Street and Technology called Analytics Help Firms Turn Data Into Opportunity that I found last week. In it Ed talks about Real Time Decisioning platforms that “deliver both rules and predictive analytics to power solutions for real-time enterprise decision management”. Ed is, of course, correct though [...]

Transpromotional marketing - yes, another new phrase that I heard for the first time this week. Wooing Customers in a Weak Economy was the source - an article on 1:1. Chris Stone wrote the article and it talks about the need to use different channels to contact customers and to do so consistently and in [...]

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe had a column “Self-serve and slave” (that I saw in the San Jose Mercury News as “In a self-serve nation, work gets dumped on us“) in which she rails against self-service and compares it to the outsourcing of work from paid employees to us consumers. As she says:
For every [...]

Thanks to my friends at Bankwatch I heard today about eBank in Japan. The bank is described in this nice article on swiftcommunity.net. What struck me about this was the focus on complete automation of decision making - not just the processes and information colleciton, but the decision making itself. Is this the person they [...]