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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Marta Foster from Proctor and Gamble gave this presentation. Marta has been at P&G for 30 years and is now in charge of their IT operations. P&G is well known and is the largest consumer products company in the world with over B in sales. They have 138,000 employees, 200 brands in 160 countries and [...]

Two articles caught my eye yesterday - Robert Nascenzi wrote an article “Real-Time Segmentation Levels the Playing Field” over on Destination CRM while Jeremy Nedelka wrote “The Ultimate Personalized Marketing” over on 1:1. Both articles focusing me in on what I have called “extreme personalization”. Jeremy’s article was a cute story about a school targeting [...]