Nice post over on the Forrester Marketing blog - Being Customer-Centric Is Hard But, C'mon, It's Not THAT Hard! in which Elena makes some good points.

However:

•  Rather than saying "enough with the automated systems already", why not make them smarter?

The problem is not that there is a system but that it is so dumb! It should know that lost cards almost always want to talk to a person, it should know that this customer always presses 0 to talk to a person, it should know that this person uses the website for almost everything and so on.

Further, it should be able to predict likely outcomes and requirements so that it can prioritize them.

This is not hard, it just requires a focus on micro, operational decisions and a willingness to automate and manage those decisions - enterprise decision management, in other words.

•  Don't just map out the process, think about the decisions within that process.

Can you automate that decision? What are the rules you need, what could your data tell you about the decision?

What are the risk and customer service predictions you could make from your data?

Could you empower front-line staff to take action if the decision on what action to take was automated?

• Free-up time and mindshare for your staff to show empathy and focus on your customers by giving them decisions not data.

If they are busy reviewing data they are not thinking about the customer.

This is one of the benefits of decision automation that I discussed in this presentation.

I have blogged before about how banks can build a better customer experience with decisioning and the importance to the customer experience of empowering people and there is a lot of related material in the CRM section of the blog.

I blogged a couple of days ago about customer-centricity and EDM after seeing a different Forrester post and, if you care about this topic, you should read Jonathan Tisch's book Chocolates on the Pillow are not enough.