Little known ways to improve customer experience

I was reading a nice white paper the other day on Customer Experience Management - RightNow is making it available here and it is based on a survey of folks on the RightNow website. The paper defined customer experience as "The customer’s perception of interactions with a brand". It notes that perception is critical, that an interaction can be almost anything and that brand is "a promise to be fulfilled". The survey identified some key things companies could do to improve the customer experience and it seemed to me that the judicious use of decision technologies could help with a number of these:

Personal attention, reward for loyalty
Part of the promise of decision technologies is the use of business rules and analytics to deliver more personalized interactions. Taking all that information you have gathered about a customer and using it to change how their call is routed or handled, what offer or price they get and so on. Combine thiswith the power of business rules to manage loyalty programs (which tend to be very dynamic and so hard to code in something that does not support change well) and you can see how decision automation can deliver on this.
Friendly and caring employees
Now I have to confess that there is not much I can do here! That said, if you remove the need for your staff to constantly refer things for approval by empowering them to take decisions (using decision technology) then they will seem more caring. As one respondent said, it does not really matter how nice someone is if they can't actually do what needs doing. Automation of analysis of data can also help by allowing customer-facing staff to focus on the interaction with a customer not on wading through reports on their screen to try and figure out what a customer might need.
High-quality goods or services
Unless you have information based goods or services there's no help here. If you do then rules can make it easier to manage the dynamic nature of information-based products.
Excellent customer service
This might mean making it possible for customers to self-serve or it might mean empowering your call center to make potentially complex decisions involving risk by automating key decisions but either way you can and should use decision technologies to improve customer service.
Well-trained and helpful employees
As far as the well-trained bit goes you are on your own. Decision technologies can make them more helpful though, by ensuring that anyone who interacts with a customer can make key business decisions correctly, appropriately and quickly

So there you have it. Automate decisions, improve customer experience. There's more in the marketing and CRM sections of my other blog.