Why is EDM important now?

The need for EDM springs from the increasing complexity of making decisions:

• Decisions that once took days now have to be made at the speed of the transaction, such as while a customer is completing an online transaction.
• Business objectives used to be simpler and set at the local level — now those objectives are set at the corporate level, and involve trade-offs between risk, resource constraints, opportunity costs and other factors.
• The data available to make decisions has ballooned, but there are challenges to using all that data effectively.
• Businesses must comply with more new regulations, stricter and more complex rules, shorter deadlines, and greater consequences for non-compliance.
• Businesses need to change their customer treatment strategies more frequently and more rapidly to deal with competitive forces, environmental changes, and changes in their customer base.
• Decisions that were once "owned" by a single group are "shared" by multiple departments, and have to be coordinated across channels and regions.
• Customers expect the same treatment regardless of channel and they expect that the treatment is consistent with the value of their relationship.
• Businesses used to be able to handle decisions requiring manual review processes – now the volume makes that impractical.