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 [...]

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 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 [...]

Jeff Hammond’s theme for this presentation is that as enterprise experiment with web 2.0 some successful adoption patterns are emerging. There are three ways to look at web 2.0:

Enabling technologies
Flex, Air, Silverlight, XML, Ajax, cloud computing
Core applications
Blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, rss, mashups built on these core technologies
Behavior shifts
Information workplaces, social computing, dynamic business applications, [...]

After lunch I joined the Insurance track and listened to Don Light of Celent (who wrote this nice paper some time ago) and Mike Gordon of Fair Isaac. Mike started and his first slide was headlined “survival of the fittest” which seems like the right headline! There is clearly a lot on in insurance these [...]

Evening of Monday night and its party time in the solutions area of IMPACT. Once again the wonderful string quartet were strutting their electric stuff and the food and drinks were good. I spent my time speaking to the few folks present who were really interested in decisioning (Chordiant, ILOG, select IBMers) and then went [...]

My friends over on the Diamond Analytics blog posted an update to an old post today where they talked about some recent instances where the ATM is being used as a sales channel. Ron Shevlin had a good comment on the original post about the appropriateness of the channel given queues, screens etc. so I [...]