Week 10 – Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence

What is your understanding of CRM?


A goal of an organisation to build their customer base and profitability, they must increase customer loyalty and retain it. This is involves managing every aspect of a customer's relationship with the organisation.

Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.


Operational CRM supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers.


Analytical CRM supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with customers.


The main difference between the two is the direct interaction between the organisations and its customers.

Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments.


Marketing


List generators: compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns


Campaign management systems: Guide users through marketing campaigns performing such tasks as campaign definitions, planning, scheduling, segmentation and success analysis.


Cross-selling: the selling of additional products or services to a customer. e.g. 'fries with that'


Up-selling: increasing the value of the sale. 'Super size’.


Sales


Sales management: automate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organise all of their accounts.


Contact management: Maintains customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales.


Opportunity management: Target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales.

How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?


 Get a customer's attention;


 Value their time;


 Over-deliver;


 Contact the customer frequently;


 Generate a trustworthy mailing list; and


 Follow up, by letting the customer know that their time was appreciated.

Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses.


Business intelligence refers to the applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to and analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts.


Many organisations today find it almost impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses because the enormous amount of organisational data is inaccessible to all but the IT department. In every organisation, employees make hundreds of decisions a day. To improve the quality of business decisions, managers can provide existing staff with BI systems and tools that can assist them in making better, more informed decisions.

Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem.


Problems


Date latency: the time duration to make ready for analysis and loading the data on the database.


Analysis latency: the time which data are made available to the time when analysis is complete. Its length depends on the time it takes a business to actually do the analysis.


Decision latency: the time it takes a human to comprehend the analysis and determine an appropriate action.

Solution


The key is to shorten these latencies so that the time frame for optimistic influences on customer, suppliers and others is faster, more interactive and better positioned. This is done when the customer is actually in the store rather than after they leave.

What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?


 Extract information that cannot be obtained by raw data and uncovers business intelligence in vast amounts of data;


 Helps determine trends in the market; and


 Aid in developing marketing campaigns to target each market segment.