Special Issue of INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics—Analytics and Personalizing Moments that Matter to Customers: New Realm of Customer Centricity

Customer experience personalization is at the center of any consumer products and services business in the 21st century. From pharmaceutical drugs to content streaming and online purchases to search engines, personalization is a key to gain and maintain customers. With companies such as Starbucks, Verizon, Netflix, and Amazon already investing billions of dollars in personalizing their customers’ experiences, the new war is not in competitive pricing but in the experiences provided to the customers.

In the era of big data when every click of customers on an app or website platform is collected and stored, data scientists and analytics professionals have access to rich customer datasets that were not available before. Therefore, customer experience analytics (CXA) is a growing area within data science and analytics communities where machine learning algorithms and the computing power of super clusters are used to provide customers with better experiences.

Within this context, this special issue calls for successful implementations of systems of insights (SOI), use cases and customer experience transformations by companies leveraging big data, and different types of analytics, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, optimization, simulation, and natural language processing/inferences/understanding on topics such as (but not limited to)

• • modeling customer behaviors in digital and traditional engagement channels, customer experience transformation experiences within traditional channels where data and analytics were used for experience transformation;

• • personalizing customer experiences in customer service operations, including digital (web/app/chatbot/do it yourself (DIY)) and traditional channels (agent/interactive voice response (IVR)/contact centers), including algorithm designs and implementations;

• • cross-channel analytics, including customer journey mapping (CJM) and analytics (CJA), pain point identification and reduction, and experience improvement;

• • customer recognition, including personalizing customer rewards, tenure recognition, and so on;

• • marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), ad targeting, marketing campaign management (MCM), and similar topics where analytics and data have been utilized to increase revenue or decrease customer churn rates or improve customer experiences;

• • omni/opti-channel experiences, including transformations from traditional channels to optimal customer engagement channels;

• • proactive outreach that predicts customer needs and provides the appropriate “pushed” engagement, replacing reactive, customer-initiated interactions;

• • all predictive, prescriptive, and descriptive solutions and algorithms targeting to improve customer engagement and experiences and resulting in churn reduction or revenue increase; and

• • use cases and case studies where the use of data science and analytics played a major role in shifting customer behaviors and improving customer experiences.

The editors encourage potential authors to contact them with ideas for papers before making a full submission of a paper. Please note the following dates:

• • February 15, 2020: Letter of intention to publish due to the editors, with an abstract including the organization at which the work was implemented.

• • July 15, 2020: Target deadline for first round of submissions.

• • August 15, 2020: First round of reviews completed; decisions (and requests for revision, if appropriate) delivered to authors.

• • December 15, 2020: Second round of reviews delivered to authors.

• • January 15, 2021: Final versions of accepted papers must be submitted.

Authors should review the instructions on preparing a paper for the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics at https://pubsonline.informs.org/page/inte/submission-guidelines.

Papers must be submitted online at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/inte.

When submitting a paper, please note the following:

• • Under “Step 1: Type, Title, & Abstract,” select “Special Issue” for “Type.”

• • Under “Step 5: Details & Comments,” answer “This paper is for which special issue?” with “Personalizing Moments.”

Publication contact information for the special issue editors:

Hossein Abdollahnejadbarough

Verizon, Inc., Basking Ridge, New Jersey

[email protected]

Pallav Chhaochhria

Citi Group, New York, New York

[email protected]

Yanai S. Golany

Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, California

[email protected]

Shashi Mittal

Amazon.com, Seattle, Washington

[email protected]