Event-Based Customer Marketing and Decision Management

(Posed by guest blogger, James Taylor)

Richard Higginbotham wrote a nice little post over on mycustomer.com called "Right here, right now: Event-triggered marketing". The use of enterprise decision management or EDM to deliver on this kind of customer-centric, event-based marketing is  such a clear and compelling use of EDM that I wanted to write about it some more.

There are many reasons for the move to event-based marketing including, but not limited to:

• The growing pressure to manage customers across products and cross channels.
• More demanding consumers who expect their service providers to remember them and their preferences.
• Growing restrictions on the kind of unsolicited mailings and calls allowed in most countries.
• A real-time, no waiting culture, especially among younger more net-savvy consumers.
• Awareness of the waste inherent in traditional bulk mailings at a time when consumers want companies to act more "green".
• Margin pressure for multi-product/multi-service companies facing competition from newer, more focused competitors offering just one excellent-value service or product
• Competitive pressure as some companies get their act together

The challenges for a company in moving to event-based marketing, however, are significant. Not only is their an organizational and philosophical change (away from business cycles and towards customer behavior), the technology challenges are real also.

• More up to date data is required, with less latency, and real-time decision making is often needed.
• Integration with multiple, often very different, systems is essential to ensure consistency across channels.
• Regulatory compliance, and company policy enforcement, must both change to support the new approach
• Bulk junk mail may be irritating but junk event marketing is even more annoying and so precision in targeting and segmentation is critical
• As always, cost is an issue.

What this points to is that an approach like EDM is ideal for moving to event-based marketing. EDM focuses on precision, consistency, agility, speed and cost, the decision yield of a (marketing) decision and all these aspects are important. EDM uses business rules to ensure compliance and policy enforcement, and to allow rapid change in the face of new requirements. EDM uses predictive and descriptive analytics to accurately segment and target customers. EDM is delivered by building easy-to-integrate decision services so that the right decisions can be delivered to every channel. EDM can be adopted in one channel, for one decision and gradually expanded.