Using Edm To Improve The Customer Experience

by FICO

(Posted by guest blogger, James Taylor)

Dale Wolf had a post this week titled "9 Steps to a Valued, Differentiated and Consistently Delivered Customer Experience". It was a very useful list and it seemed to me useful to map Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) into it to show how EDM can help you deliver the customer experience of your dreams.

Identify what customers value
While this step is mostly about interacting with your customers, analyzing the behavior of customers on your website or in terms of the products and services they buy is an important consideration also. One of the best ways to tell what customers value is, after all, to determine what they are willing to pay for! Building analytic models of this will pay off both here and later when you automate.
Aggregate customers with similar values
Classic use of analytics - segmentation. I would add that you should also aggregate customers with similar predictions for future behavior not just similar assessments of past values.
Determine value gaps for each cluster
Classic marketing analysis, not much different for EDM-based marketing except that for each gap it would be useful to know when you might be able to decide to fill that gap.
Prioritize gaps you can best fill
Again the only addition would be to include an assessment of your ability to act at the right moment in your prioritization.
Determine tools to deliver value
Which channels, which interaction points, which decision points.
Eliminate all non-value adding messages, tools and channels
And make sure that all those you keep are consistent and deliver the same decisions consistently.
Improve and automate critical processes
And the decisions within those processes. Deciding how and when to act to improve customer experience is critical. EDM is focused on those moments of decision within your customer service and marketing processes. Don't forget to consider all the decisions in all the processes that might impact a customer experience so you can reuse the right decision across them all.
Select contextually relevant strategies to communicate value
An important note - just because you are trying to take a consistent decision does not mean that the context in which you are taking the decision is not both an input to the decision and relevant to how you act on the decision. You want to make the same cross-sell offer, perhaps, but would do so differently in different channels.
Measure continuously against goals
And implement adaptive control to try alternative approaches as you go. You may think you have the best approach but not only should you monitor this approach, you should have some way to try alternative challengers all the time.