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 [...]

Randy Saunders had a great post over on the Perfect Customer Experience -Can I please speak with a live agent? In it he has a great quote:
Forester’s study finds that 45 percent of consumers prefer to speak with a customer service agent to answer questions and resolve service issues, yet most walk away from customer [...]

Last week I was invited to attend Chordiant’s European Customer Advisory Board. This session was held in lovely Munich in the middle of Oktoberfest and was both informative and a lot of fun. While I can’t share everything - some of it was for customers only - I thought you would appreciate what I could [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

BusinessWeek had a great article on customer vigilantes last week - Consumer Vigilantes. The inability of companies to provide decent customer service has become more and more of an issue in recent years. Partly this is due to off-shoring and cost-cutting, but I believe the stupidity of their information systems is even more to blame.
Most [...]

Well, it’s a wrap. That’s the end of the Customer Experience posts.
Enterprise Decision Management, EDM, can be an effective tool in delivering on a true 21st Century customer experience – personalized and cost-effective customer service that builds loyalty and gets calls resolved quickly, even when they are not “calls” at all. EDM delivers value across [...]

While the primary focus of applying EDM to customer service should not be cost containment or reduction, there is still a role for EDM in managing costs. For instance:

With 25% churn and complex IT systems, training costs are a huge problem for call centers.
By automating decisions EDM can reduce the complexity and thus cost of [...]