Customer Relationship management & Business Intelligence - Week Eleven Questions

1.     What is your understanding of CRM? Customer Relationship Management involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention as well as organizations profitability. CRM allows an organization to gain insights into customers’ shopping and buying behaviors. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management. Operational customer relationship management supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations systems that deal directly with the customers. Whereas, analytical customer relationship management 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 customer relationship management technologies allows businesses to gather and analyse customer information to deploy successful marketing campaigns, therefore marketing departments are able to transform to this new way of doing business by using CRM technologies. In addition to this is customer relationship management technologies used by sales departments were the first to begin developing CRM systems. Sales departments had two primary reasons to track customer sales information electronically. 1)     Sales representatives were struggling with the overwhelming amount of customer account information they were required to maintain and track. 2)     Companies were struggling with the issues that much of their vital customer and sales information remained in the heads of their sales representatives. 4.      How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies? Operational customer relationship management supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers. A sales department could help automate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales represent co-ordinate and organise all of accounts. Features include, calendars to help plan customer meetings, alarm reminds signalling important tasks, customisable multimedia presentations and document generation. 5.     Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses Business intelligence (BI) refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to and analyze data and information to support decision-making efforts. Business intelligence has a high value to business as it allows for systems and tools of business users to receive data for analysis. 6.     Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem The problem associated with business intelligence is experience, knowledge and the rule of thumb taking years to develop as some employees never acquire them. 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. The result creates an agile intelligent enterprise. 7.     What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

Data mining is the process of analysing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone. Data mining can begin at a summary information level and progress through increasing levels of detail or the reverse. Data mining is the primary tool used to uncover business intelligence in vast amounts of data.