Sunday, May 30, 2010

Week Ten - CRM & BI

1. What is your understanding of CRM?

CRM is concerned with any aspect of the business that will have an affect on the customer and all areas the customer has an affect on. Therefore it is important to see that CRM goes beyond just customer service systems. Whether directly or indirectly as the customer is seen as the most important person in business it is important to give them what they want, and the business should be designed to accomplish that.


2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM is concerned with the 'face' of the organisation, sections such as marketing, sales and customer service. Any section thathas direct contact with customers in the organisations day-to-day operations. Analytical CRM is more concerned with the collection of data from the operational sectors of the organisation, these back-office operations such as data warehousing and data mining are seen to include all systems that do not deal directly with customers. The division is shown in the diagram:


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

Marketing success can be seen as being determined by the organisations ability to gather and analyse the right information, the three CRM technologies marketing uses are :
- List Generators: compiles a list of customer information from a number of sources and then segments the information for different marketing campaigns. The list is the reviewed for potential customers.
- Campaign Management: Guides users through the process of making a marketing campaign helps perform tasks such as definition, planning, scheduling, segmentation and success analysis, can be used to calculate return on investment for certain campaigns.
- Cross-selling/ Up-selling: Selling additional products to customers and increasing the value of a sale made by asking if they want and upgrade.

Sales CRM was the first developments of CRM as it was needed to streamline the process of dealing with customers, it was a method to make all accounts digital and have a storage lace for all customer information. sales also use three primary technologies:
- Sales Management CRM Systems: Automates each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organise all of their accounts.
- Contact Management CRM system: maintains all current customer information and identifies prospective customers for future sales.
- Opportunity Management CRM Systems: targets sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales.


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

Sales departments can use operational CRm technologies to maintain the relationship they have established with customers and by fostering the relationship it will lead to a more profitable relationship due to returned business. By using the information gathered sales can also determine the profitable prospective customers and tailor strategies to try and get more of those customers.


5. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses.

Business intelligence is concerned with the applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to and analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts. Through a greater understanding of an organisation's strengths and weaknesses it will become more efficient. Business intelligence is essential to the success of an organisation as it is primarily concerned with having an understanding of the operations undertaken by the organsiation. The provided video gives a further detailed view of the value of business intelligence:




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

The general problem associated with business intelligence is that companies have invest so much money in to systems such as their customer relationship programs they have begun to have an excessive amount of data. While this collection of data is a good thing, the data is useless unless it is analysed and turned into meaningful information. While ever companies continue to have data being collected and not analysed it is a waste of a resource that should be getting used.

The Solution to this problem is to develop BI systems for workers to make better informed decisions in situations. Through doing this they create an agile intelligent enterprise. Examples of how companies can use BI to make informed decisions are:
- Retail and Sales: Predicting sales; determining correct inventory levels and distribution schedules among outlets; and loss prevention.
- Operations Management: Predicting machinery failure; finding key factors that control optimism of manufacturing capacity.
- Law Enforcement: Tracking crime patterns, locations and criminal behaviour; identifying attributes to assist in solving criminal cases.


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

From the use of cluster analysis it is possible for companies to have greater customer segmentation. It can allow a company to segment customer information for customer relationship management systems to help organisations identify customers with similar behavioural traits, such as clusters of best customers or one time customers.

Also by implementing statictical analysis it is possible for comapanies to offer knowledge workers a wide range of powerful statistical capabilities so they can quickly build a variety of statistical models, examine the models assumptions and validity, and compare and contrast the various models to determine the best one for a particular business issue.

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