Week 10: Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence


1) What is your understanding of CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a widely implemented strategy for managing company's interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate and synchronise business processes.

2) Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management. 

Operational Customer Relationship Management supports transactional processing for day-to-day front office operations or systems that deal directly with the customer whereas Analytical CRM supports back-office operations and strategic analysis. It includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers. 

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

Operational CRM focuses on organising and simplifying the management of customer information. It uses a database to provide consistent information about a company's interaction with the customer. 

CRM metrics are another tool used by businesses. It is used to track and monitor performance and is the best practice for many companies. 

Sales Metrics:

- Number of prospective customers

- Number of new customers

- Number of retained customers

Marketing Metrics:

- Number of marketing campaigns

- New customer retention rates

- Number of responses by marketing campaigns

4) How could a sales departments use operational CRM technologies?

There are three marketing operational CRM technologies that are used by businesses. These include:

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

2 Campaign Management System: guides users through marketing campaigns

3. Cross-selling and up-selling: cross selling is the selling of additional products of services while up-selling increases the value of the sale. 

5) Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence uses applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information to support decision-making efforts. Business Intelligence includes simple MS Excel Pivot tables to highly sophisticated software that fetches data from the different front and back-office systems.

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

The main problem that is associated with businesses today is data rich, information poor. Businesses are

finding it close to impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses let alone those of their competitors. The reason for this is that businesses have too much information and a lot of it is not accessible by anyone besides the IT department.

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

Data mining is the application of statistical techniques to find patterns and relationships among data and to classify and predict. Two possible outcomes are
- Cluster Analysis
- Statistical Analysis

Cluster analysis is a technique used to divide information into mutually exclusive groups. CRM systems depend on cluster analysis to segment customer information and identify behavioural traits.
Statistical Analysis on the other hand performs functions as information correlations distributions, calculations and variance analysis