John Schmidt over on the Informatica blog had a great post on Customer Centricity that gave me a theme for three posts this week. He identified three approaches, each one of which I want to map to decision management.
First up is Customer Analytics. John describes this as being focused on consolidating customer information and the using it to improve marketing and customer service through improved reporting or discovering new insights. The link to decision management here is one of operationalizing the insights you gain from this approach. Unless the connections and insights can be delivered to the front line – customer service representatives or websites – then they will be of limited value. If you know who your most profitable customers are but cannot get your website to treat them differently from your least profitable then this knowledge is not helping as much as it could. Decision management puts the insights from integrated, analyzed customer information to work in operational systems and processes so that every interaction with a customer is improved.
