Customer Experience and Analytics

Last year I spent some time learning about Customer Experience and Customer Interaction Management. I enjoy both topics quite a bit. More recently due to my work with predictive analytics I have come across a number of Text Analytics companies that are focusing on improving the Customer Experience. From my experience in the Automotive and Pharmaceutical industry I know there are vast amounts of unstructured data repositories buried in most corporations; and more is generated every day.

I have found however a bit of a disconnect between decision management, text/predictive analytics and customer experience management. I think the effective management of the customer experience starts with a clear strategy that defines what the desired experience should be across customer segments. This strategy needs to be aligned with the corporate goals and have corresponding financial indicators. Once a strategy is in place, analytics can be used to detect specific behaviors or recommend the next best action. These recommendations can be as a predictive score or an alert to a customer service, sales representative or customer touchpoint. But then there is the need for a decision management system that would take the analytics' result and act on it. These decision management system needs to have rules managed by those business users responsible for managing the Customer Experience strategy.

Today I see a chasm where vendors focus just on the analytics or just on the strategy or just on the rules management. It seems to me that there is a big opportunity to bring all those pieces together in a proactive, money making, recession proof solution.