Chordiant Introduces Next-Best-Action for B2B Customers and Consumer Households

Chordiant Software, Inc. (Nasdaq:CHRD), the leading provider of Customer Experience (Cx™) software and services, today announced Chordiant Recommendation Advisor version 6.2. This latest version of Recommendation Advisor (RA) enables real-time Next-Best-Action™-driven dialog and interaction management at the business-to-business (B2B) and household level. Breakthrough multi-level decisioning capabilities allow Next-Best-Action decisions and recommendations to be made on both an individual and aggregate level at the same time. This will enable service agents to deliver personalized experiences to customers who represent an entire company or division within a company, or one or all members of a household.

Vodafone, the world’s leading international mobile communications company, is currently a satisfied Chordiant Recommendation Advisor customer and anticipates significant value from the product’s new B2B and household capabilities. Previously, support for hierarchical decisioning for complex relationships had not been available on the market in an "out-of-the-box” solution.

Large service-focused enterprises, such as insurance companies, retail banks and telecommunications companies often have hierarchical relationships with their small-to-medium sized business customers. Within these relationships, different products and incentives are offered at the corporate level, the departmental level, and the individual level. Existing relationships at each of these levels must be factored into the decision when determining the next best action to be taken during an interaction. For example, if an individual customer calls in with an inquiry, the system must be able to ensure that any offers or recommendations made to the individual fall within the parameters of existing departmental and/or corporate agreements. Equally, if a particular proposition is relevant for a number of individuals, it may make sense to create a relevant "all-in” offer at the departmental or corporate level.

With its sophisticated multi-level decisioning capabilities, Recommendation Advisor 6.2 enables contact center agents and company representatives to negotiate and make offers and recommendations that automatically account for corporate programs at all levels of operation. The same mechanism can also be applied to households, where a proposition can be tailored to a family based on recommendations for individual family members.

Chordiant Recommendation Advisor is built on Chordiant Decision Management, a suite of predictive and adaptive decisioning applications that enables business users to efficiently and safely develop highly expressive multi-channel customer experience strategies. These strategies are composed of models that predict and react to individual customer expectations, propensities and behaviors combined with intuitive, sophisticated business rules and behavioral segmentation. This combination forms "decision logic” that can be centrally deployed in the run-time environment for batch decisioning, real-time decisioning, or both, across any channel. With this powerful hub for enterprise-wide decisioning in place, companies can automatically ensure that every customer interaction is unique, appropriate, and consistent, and that Next-Best-Action decisions can occur dynamically.

In the contact center, Chordiant Recommendation Advisor provides an intelligent desktop that leverages Decision Management to assess what is known about and said by the customer in current and previous interactions and recommend the next best action to be taken. These actions can take the form of highly personalized product packages, advice, insightful questions and relevant explanations. At no point during the contact do recommendations or actions need to be scripted. Rather, Recommendation Advisor continually guides the conversation, determining and adapting actions in real-time based on customer responses and mood.

In a self-service channel, Recommendation Advisor can dynamically present personalized questions, answers, offers, advice, guiding the customer to an appropriate and satisfactory resolution of their issue or inquiry.

"Chordiant Recommendation Advisor has provided companies with revolutionary capabilities in real-time customer experience management for the past six years,” said Rob Walker, vice president, strategy and innovation, Chordiant Software. "This latest innovation expands those capabilities into the previously untapped B2B market. Not only does this ensure Chordiant’s continued technological dominance of intelligent customer interaction, but, as in the case of Vodafone, it gives our customers ways to expand the benefits of customer experience management even more deeply into their organization. We are very proud to be able to deliver extremely effective yet non-invasive solutions that measurably help companies increase success even in these difficult economic times.”

About Chordiant Software, Inc.

Chordiant helps leading global brands with high-volume customer service needs deliver the best possible customer experience. Unlike traditional business applications, Chordiant Customer Experience (Cx) front-office solutions blend multi-channel interaction management with predictive desktop decisioning, enabling companies to capture and effectively anticipate and respond to customer behavior in all channels, in real-time. For global leaders in insurance/healthcare, telecommunications and financial services, this deeper understanding cultivates a lasting, one-to-one relationship that aligns the most appropriate value proposition to each consumer. With Chordiant Cx solutions, customer loyalty, operational productivity and profitability reach new levels of return. For more information, visit Chordiant at www.chordiant.com.

Chordiant and the Chordiant logo are registered trademarks of Chordiant Software, Inc. The Customer Experience Company, Next-Best-Action and Cx are trademarks of Chordiant Software, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.