A home page is a decision

I saw this post by Seth Godin - Blow up your home page - and it made me want to point out that when a customer or prospect visits the "home page" of your site, it feels to them like you made an explicit decision to display that content they see. But did you? Probably not. Probably you made a decision about everyone who visits or perhaps you made a decision for everyone with a little bit of space reserved for logged-in users to get something special. But the whole page - its design, its content, its arrangement - can be driven by what you know about a customer, a previous visitor or even typical new visitors. This is what I meant when I talked about micro-decisions - this is a hidden micro decision.

To do this you don't need rocket-science. You need to identify that you have a decision to make (decision services) understand your customers (data and analytics), have some rules about how to treat them and what to show them (business rules), allow them to personalize this explicitly (more rules), customize it implicitly through their behavior (analytics and analytically-derived rules) and make sure you have a way to learn what works and what does not (adaptive control). What you need, in other words, is Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) applied to the "how should my website look right now to this person" decision. Extreme Personalization.

Technorati Tags: adaptive control, analytics, business rules, customer decisions, customer experience, customization, decision service, EDM, enterprise decision management, extreme personalization, micro decisions, personalization, precision marketing, predictive analytics, Seth Godin