James Kobielus of Forrester brought the concepts of predictive analytics to processes to discuss optimizing processes using the Next Best Action (NBA): using analytics and predictive models to figure out what you should do next in a process in order to optimize customer-facing processes.
As we heard in this morning’s keynote, agility is mandatory not just for competitive differentiation, for but basic business survival. This is especially true for customer-facing processes: since customer relationships are fragile and customer satisfaction is dynamic, the processes need to be highly agile. Customer happiness metrics need to be built into process design, since customer (un)happiness can be broadcast via social media in a heartbeat. According to Kobielus, if you have the right data and can analyze it appropriately, you can figure out what a customer needs to experience in order to maximize their satisfaction and maximizing your profits.
Business agility is all about converging process, data, rules and analytics. Instead of static business processes, historical business intelligence and business rules silos, we need to have real-time business Intelligence, dynamic processes, and advanced analytics and rules that guide and automate processes. It’s all about business processes, but processes infused with agile intelligence. This has become a huge field of study (and implementation) in customer-facing scenarios, where data mining and behavioral studies are used to create predictive models on what the next best action is for a specific customer, given their past behavior as your customer, and even social media sentiment analysis.
He walked through a number of NBA case studies, including auto-generating offers based on a customer’s portal behavior in retail; tying together multichannel customer communications in telecom; and personalizing cross-channel customer interactions in financial services. These are based on coupling front and back-office processes with predictive analytics and rules, while automating the creation of the predictive models so that they are constantly fine-tuned without human intervention.
Hi Sandy,
Is there an article that points to more information about the Next Best Action?
Hello Sandy, Hope you are doing great.
I think thereare two aspects to the processes in csutomer service. One is as mentioned agile processes with predictive analystics and next best action.
Another way to look at it will be managing the unpredictability and having adaptive processes. Difference being , in one situation analytics decide what the next step in the process should be (like what offer or discount to give customer)in other case change in context of interation with customer changes the process steps (like I called to change my address and can I order new checks too).
Bringing in social listening and sentiment analysis to determine behavior of dynamic process is another very intersting area.
Regards,
Ajay
PM Hut — I’m not sure, you should probably ping James directly. I included his Twitter handle and blog address above.
Ajay — yes, some dynamic processes are better handled by people in case management paradigms; James’ talk was really about the ones that can be modeled and predicted for automated decisioning.