Great experiences require good decisions!

During the day we as humans make millions of decisions. For example when two people talk to each other we have a large amount of thoughts and make hundreds of decisions to correctly guide us through the conversation.
Some of these are small, like “I don’t like to go out now, because it’s raining” others might have more impact and require proper consideration, like “I know you lost a close relative last month, so I need and want to be easy on you”.

And obviously getting better in conversations requires practicing and learning. The decision making process is fluid: learning from the feedback of the people you are talking to, seeing reactions alters what we say and how we say it.
The same thing holds for the interactions between organizations and their customers.

In this Digital age, the interactions and decisions are not only handled by the people in your organization, but can increasingly be handled by IT systems. Imagine a customer browsing your web shop, trying to find that one particular product. Or a customer going through your knowledge base, who is trying to find the answer to her particular question.  In both examples good, real-time decisions about what is the best thing to do, say or show to a customer will make the difference between a good experience and a great experience!

In a split second, in real-time these IT solutions must be capable of learning: what are bad offers? What works well? What is a great decision or offer? Then the solution can act instantly on what it has ‘learned’.

So wouldn’t it be good to have an IT solution that learns and adapts itself to customer behavior then takes those little decisions away and saves your staff time? But how to get there?

Start small, maybe with just one area, like your webshop or just a limited set of use cases like just specific customer care processes. That’s where you’ll get the biggest benefit first.

Then, when you actually start looking for a technical solution think hard about which domain you’d like to use the decision engine in. Is it primarily online, through the web or would you like an enterprise decision engine that can be used throughout your organization, business processes and multiple channels?

So what could automated, real-time decisioning do for your organization, how much could it save you, how much could it earn?  If you want to talk it through, I’d love to hear.

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off