Improving customer interactions one decision at a time

William Band at Forrester (@waband) recently tweeted that his next research project was:

When to use CRM apps vs BPM tools to improve customer interactions? Pros & Cons of each?

I replied that companies should be sure to manage customer treatment decisions too and he asked me to expand on that thought.

William Band at Forrester (@waband) recently tweeted that his next research project was:

When to use CRM apps vs BPM tools to improve customer interactions? Pros & Cons of each?

I replied that companies should be sure to manage customer treatment decisions too and he asked me to expand on that thought.

Every customer interaction requires decisions – you must make a selection from a range of offers, pick a course of action, agree (or not) to a request. These interactions involve conversation, process, data and more also but there is always a decision or a set of decisions. When I think about my interactions with companies, it is the effectiveness, relevance or value of the decisions they make that stays with me. When I talk to Asus about my eeePC, it is their decision to handle the repair without complaint or delay that I remember. When I call my bank about a fee, it is their decision not to refund it that I remember, not how nice the agent was or how efficient their process. When I log on to an online account it is the relevance of the offer being displayed that I notice. Decisions matter to customers and to customer interactions.

And these decisions are customer-specific, customer-centric. Each decision is what Neil and I called a micro-decision in our book. Each decision relates to a single customer and each may seem relatively unimportant. But the cumulative effect of those decisions is very great. Making a compelling offer to a single customer is probably not going to make all that much difference to your bottom line. Making a more compelling offer to each customer who calls, however, adds up to real money for organizations with large numbers of customers.

To improve these decisions takes more than CRM or BPM. It takes an explicit focus on decisions, especially high-volume operational decisions. It takes business rules to manage the logic of those decisions (so that the business can collaborate in defining how they should be made while the systems environment applies those rules systematically and consistently across all customers) and predictive analytics to predict what will work or not work for each customer (a model that predicts how likely this customer is to churn or that customer is to accept an offer). It also takes experimentation and a focus on continuous improvement as decision making must evolve as business circumstances do.

Neither CRM nor BPM tools have  the necessary focus on decisions – CRM tools tend to be focused on the information about a customer (necessary to drive better decisions) while BPM tools tend to focus on how to act on the decisions made about a customer (fulfilling the action). Both are necessary to manage the customer interaction but so are decisions and so is decision management.

I have blogged about this topic before. Check out:

• This series on a 21st Century Customer Experience
• This one on whether your live agents are helping or hurting you with customers
• This one on the value of decision management rather than operational BI in call centers