Week 10: Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence

1. What is your understanding of CRM?

Customer Relationship Management has become an integral component of modern business, it involves the managing of all aspects of customer interactions with an organisation with the intention of increasing good customers and increasing profitability (it costs less to retain loyal customers than find new ones).

2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM is transactional, used day-to-day to record the types of things that directly happen with customers (e.g. call made, problem lodged). It is a short-term tool.

Analytical CRM is strategic, based on the concept of data mining in that it searches for patterns and trends. Supports back-office operations, and inlcudes all systems that do not deal directly with customers. It is a long-term tool.3. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments.

The CRM technologies used by marketing departments are campaign management (which includes information such as costs, target audience, return on investment) and opportunity management.

The CRM technologies used by sales departments are used to coordinate the sales process, by helping salespeople organise their jobs, calendars, contacts, appointments, meetings and multimedia presentations. Essentially, it allows for the streamlining of the sales process.

4. How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

A sales department can use CRM technologies for a number of things:

• List generators, e.g. to find information a particular customers in a particular demographic.
• Campaign management.
• To know when and what to up-sell and cross-sell.

5. Describe business intelligence and its value to business.

Business intelligence refers to technologies that provide access to data for strategic decision making. It is a long-term tool that supports decision making. It is valuable to a business as it allows managers to find patterns and trends, and better respond to change in the dynamic business environment.

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

The problem associated with business intelligence is that businesses are data rich but information poor. The solution to this problem is business intelligence, which allows for better decision making and reduces latency.

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

Two benefits a business could get from data mining are:

• Better use of resources.
• More sales through being able to better market products based on the intelligence gained by data mining.