Correspondence: Shaun Doyle, Sams Barn The Greenway West Hendred Wantage Oxon OX12 8RD, UK. Tel: +44 7831 427905; e-mail: shaun.doyle@cognitivebox.com

¹is CEO of Cognitive Box, an international analytics CRM consulting company. He has been involved in over 200 projects around the world that have been concerned with improving marketing performance through the use of technology, process and organizational change. He is currently involved in developing and implementing self-service solutions in five organizations, three in the telco sector, one in the banking sector and one in the direct insurance industry. Prior to setting up Cognitive Box, he was the Founder and Chairman of Intrinsic, a campaign management vendor acquired by SAS in March 2001. While at SAS, he was involved in the development of the SAS Marketing solutions: Marketing Automation, Marketing Optimization and Interaction Management.

Abstract

As the cost of servicing the customer relationship grows, more and more organisations are looking at how technology can slow down and in some cases reduce the costs of managing the customer relationship while at the same time driving up customer service. The result has been the growth in self-service technologies that aim to address both the cost and service quality issues. This paper illustrates how a telco organisation developed a strategy for the deployment of self-service within the organisation. It is based on a real project but has been modified to include lessons from a number of other similar projects.