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Does IBM Have All The Software To Optimize Customer Experiences?

posted Oct 1, 2010 8:14 AM by Michael Hoffman
Customer Experience 40 Days Not To Be Forgotten

IBM's recent Unica acquisition announcement changed the customer experience management technology and services landscape forever.  IBM quickly followed up with the Netezza  announcement adding to their ability offer a super fast decisioning engine (BI: Neteeza + Cognos + SPSS + IBM tools - Coremetrics/SurfAid II) customer contact level execution ( Unica + CoreMetrics + Sterling Commerce + Lombardi + Cast Iron Systems , IBM Websphere) guiding content and capturing results to and from every contact. 

IBM has effectively bought best of breed customer experience management software components investing nearly $10B to buy products that actually work and mostly work together. (Unica's Sane acquisition and NetTracker will be more valuable here than most realize... or maybe need to)

While IBM's own products cover a huge expanse of the CxC Matrix customer experience IBM does not offer it's own brand of CRM, social networking, display, broadcast advertising, affiliate management, etc. products but partners with companies based on industry vertical expertise, company size and customer strategy (channel mix).


CxC Matrix Conceptual IBM Customer Experience Platform Contact Execution

What is most notable using the CxC Matrix is IBM's investment in the digital channel, connectivity, and business process management across any system, network and platform now and well into the future. This makes perfect sense as digital transactions and messaging are expected to grow twenty-fold over the next four years. Additionally, more customer contacts are becoming digitized so traditional channels and content management will act and look like digital/web content management, i.e. personalized mail, billing statement, phone greetings, digital signage.

All this gets more interesting, more valuable and yes, more complex with IBM's steep investment in BI and analytics tools. I can only assume that IBM, PWC and clients will use frameworks similar to the CxC Matrix taxonomy to score, rank, prioritize, execute and refine every activity running through their information management network. 


IBM Customer Experience Platform's best of breed components theoretically enable a continuous learning and adapting customer contact infrastructure machine that can be used to quickly identify and automate customer contact processes and components for advertising, sales, marketing, fulfillment, operations and service functions while identifying or sensing under performing and at risk events and conditions.