Week Ten Questions: Chapter 9

1.     What is your understanding of CRM?

Customer-relationship management (CRM) involves managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organisation to increase customer loyalty and retention as well as an organisation's profitability.

2.     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 the customers.

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

The three primary operational CRM technologies a marketing department can implement to increase customer satisfaction are:

-        List Generators: compile customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns

-        Campaign Management: guide users through marketing campaigns performing such tasks as campaign definition, planning, scheduling, segmentation and success analysis

-        Cross-Selling: is selling additional products or services to a customer (Up-Selling: is increasing the value of the sale)

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

Sales departments had two primary reasons to track customer information electronically. First, sales representatives were struggling with the overwhelming amount f customer account information they were required to maintain and track.  Second, companies were struggling with the issue that much of their vital customer and sales information remained in the heads of their sales representatives.

5.     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. It allows business users to receive data for analysis being reliable, consistent, understandable, and easily manipulated.

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

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

Data mining is the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone.