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07.31.09 Increasing Your Customer's Business Engagement 
By James Taylor
Shantanu Narayen of Adobe recently said “Engagement is the new business mandate” and when Denise Shiffman (author of The Age of Engage) spoke at a recent CMO summit she added: As I talk to customers, partners, and employees, it becomes increasingly clear to me that the health of a company relies on the extent to which it creates meaningful and sustainable interactions. As social media has exploded and customers have access to more and more information, I too believe that companies must focus on improving customer engagement. But when most companies think of customer engagement they think of Facebook, blogging, review sites like Yelp and so on. How can decision management help in this? How, more specifically, can decision management help you turn your existing enterprise applications into something you can use to improve customer engagement? Well let's start by answering how typical enterprise applications, both CRM systems and others, handicap attempts to engage customers. The key problems with these kinds of applications when it comes to customer engagement are:
• They treat all customers the same
Enterprise applications tend to do very little – they mostly wait for their human operators to do things – but when they do they tend to treat everyone the same. They give every customer the same set of options, send them the same letters, display the same offers and so on. Customers do not engage with this kind of mindless, soulless system. • They support one channel, creating cross-channel confusion Customers want to have a dialog, a conversation, with the companies they do business with and increasingly this means a cross-channel dialog. With each channel having its own backend system, customers get a disconnected and confusing response from companies. Again, no engagement there.
• They don't learn from customer behavior
Customers expect companies to remember them, to remember what they do. And they expect everything to be remembered. Some enterprise applications will remember orders places, others offers made, others still web pages visited or service calls made. None of these systems typically learn from the others and most don't learn even from their own history – they go on acting as though they know nothing about a customer. It's hard to like someone who never remembers anything about you and it's hard to engage with a company that does not remember you either. The basic problem is that customers expect your interactions with them to be personal and deliberate and they will only engage with you if they are. If you treat them impersonally, casually mistreat them then they will go elsewhere. If you can't make their interactions engaging, you won't keep them as customers. The power of decision management in this is that it allows you to inject personalized, deliberate, “thoughtful” decisions into these existing systems so that they take more appropriate actions and so become more engaging. It makes it possible to turn these dumb applications into smarter ones, that learn from past behavior and reflect customer preferences. As always there are three steps:
• Decision discovery
Find the decisions you make about your customers and about how to interact with them. Decisions like what options to list in the IVR system, what offers to make on the website, what discount to offer, what content to display or what product to suggest. Knowing what these decisions are, and finding the micro decision opportunities where you can make a different decision for every customer, is critical. These decisions, especially the micro decisions, drive the engagement in your systems' interactions. Continue reading this article.
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