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 [...]

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 [...]

David Greer had a cutely named post this week - The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications - it [...]

I discovered over the weekend that there is a game called “What’s On Page 123″ that involves bloggers tagging each other. As Ken Molay, an old friend who writes the Webinar blog tagged me I now have to post to keep it going. The deal is that you have to write about the book you [...]

Having just written a post about how vague the word analytics is, I see Ann All’s post Banks Using Analytics to Boost Customer Retention. What’s interesting about Ann’s post is not that she makes it clear what kind of analytics she is discussing but that almost any of the various kinds of analytics can [...]

This review in destinationCRM of iRobot’s automated customer service system - in which the system was given a 2008 Elite award - reminded me of an experience with a different iRobot system. iRobot’s return system is less award-worthy. Let me take you back a few months…
At Christmas I took advantage of an iRobot offer to [...]

I had a chance to talk with Rob Walker last week about Chordiant and their decision management platform. Chordiant focuses on large customers - those with lots of decisions in markets such as retail banking, consumer lending, card services, insurance and communications. Their mantra is Customer Experience Management and they aim to deliver an improvement [...]

I recently finished Ade McCormack’s book, The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership. The book is aimed at a fairly high-level audience and makes a case for better integration, or “entwinement”, of technology into businesses. Ade can come across somewhat opinionated but he gives you fair warning of this right up front [...]

Irene and Dean of TopQuadrant (a semantic web company) were up next talking about Deploying Semantic Web Solutions: I’ve Built an Ontology, Now What?
The challenges around Master Data Management have expanded as the number of information sources has exploded. Managing identify, managing semantics across a multi-faceted, distributed world is very complex. The semantic web standards [...]