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Q:  How can Rules be used to improve eCRM systems?
 


The Internet brings a disquieting visibility to a company's processes and systems. Customers interacting directly with a company see first hand its awkwardness, inefficiencies and inadequacies. Companies can no longer hide behind brick facades or layers of staff and must now interact directly with customers at "eSpeed" through multiple channels.
 
The original productivity promise of technology to "process transactions faster" was accomplished by depersonalizing customer interactions and grouping like functions for the benefit of the company - forcing customers to navigate the resulting islands. Traditional CRM transaction-recording systems are remarkably context-free - they document the "what," but know little about "who" or "why" - overwhelming users that are presented with the same screens of information regardless of the circumstance with massive amounts of data. Productivity and service quality decline because the static technology doesn't guide the increasingly complex offerings by dynamically adapting based on user, customer and product. Furthermore, traditional technology approaches create rigidity by burying business intelligence in channel specific computer programs or having it dispersed in the minds and experiences of staff.
 
Creating a rules architecture brings visibility and control to the business intelligence - making it a business asset. This is in stark contrast to table-driven systems where the logic is rigid and change is limited to turning hard-coded pre-designated knobs. Code lends itself to similar processes; tables freeze the process, but rules adapt the process.
 
Organizations deliver value through the rules that define its business processes. The rules of a business are the brains of a business, and bringing order to this critical asset requires an enterprise approach to organizing rules. Integrating rules into your systems architecture makes your systems smarter and more responsive. A smart system driven by rules is able to analyze facts in real time, understand if more information is needed, and drive resulting processes and interactions consistent with the direction of management.
 
Recent technology advances give management the opportunity to create a rules architecture that reconciles both similarities and specializations across an enterprise. Providing centralized management and distributed access to the rules of a business leverages common processes across segments while supporting differentiation where appropriate. Embedding best practices into the system allows it to change dynamically based on the nature of the specific request - providing service representatives with guidance just in time, all the time. We know that, in the zero-training environment of the Web, we must guide the interactions of people who access the company's processes. A consistent, rules-oriented approach allows you to guide business process on the Web, in the call center and everywhere else.
 
A rules vision resonates with the increasing interoperability between businesses, customers and partners. A rules architecture allows an organization to selectively put rules in the hands of the customers themselves; allowing them to personalize business processes to their specific needs. Bringing customers into the business process improves satisfaction, retention and profitability.