If you think people buy from people, think again

Interesting presentation by Henry H. Harteveldt of Forrester on "Creating Emotionally Engaging Digital Experiences" at the Consumer Forum 2006

What strikes me about this is the extent to which electronic interactions are going to drive the customer experience. This proliferation of electronic channels and the increasing use of them by customers, including potentially your best customers, means you had better have a way to control and improve these interactions. Automating key customer treatment decisions, using an enterprise decision management or EDM approach, is a great way to do this.

• You can use embedded analytics to target customers more precisely to get better results - precision
• You can use business rules to make sure it is easy to constantly change and adapt the decisions as you learn what works or need to respond to changes - agility
• You can control a single point of decision across channels so that customers get the service they deserve (and that you decide to give them) regardless of the channel they choose - consistency

Increasingly your customers are going to buy from your systems, not from your people. Make sure your systems make the same kind of decisions you train your staff to.

There's a lot on this topic in the CRM/Customer Service section and I presented about this recently for the Teradata Partners Conference.

Technorati Tags: analytics, business rules, CRM, customer experience, decision automation, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, Forrester, predictive analytics