| It seemed new and fresh to me when I heard the word "Electronic business" for the first time during my earlier days of university campus life, also did the word ERP, enterprise resource planning on the Project Management course during my postgraduate studies. Nowadays almost everybody is talking about them, even many friends of mine are busy working with the ERP system of their company. We can find numerous related books or articles in the market or on the net. More and more new words are flooding us, such as CRM, customer relationship management.Actually, customer relationship management is not as new as it seems to be. The case of old corner grocer at the very beginning of the article proved it very well. What I have to emphasize is customer relationship management is not equal to CRM though it seemed no difference existed between them literally. Customer relationship management trends to be a kind of management strategy. CRM is more likely to be a set of solution to the problem of customer relationship management. People paid a lot of attention to customer relation and gave new meaning to it continuously. Customer relationship management includes acquiring new customer, retain existing customer, improving customer profitability and all the other things related to customer. The goal of customer relationship management is to carry out the "customer-oriented" management strategy.To realize the goal of customer-oriented strategy, we need information technology to support us. Many companies had built their own CRM system, but unfortunately they had no substantial improvement in customer relationship management. On one hand, the main function of CRM system is only to keep marketing, sales and customer service in conformity with each other and automate customer communication (such as telephone, fax, network, e-mail, etc), on the other hand, CRM system itself, plus other application systems inside the company and outside data source had produced numerous data with 90% of them had not been used.Most of all kinds of CRM software on the market nowadays are operational CRM which lies on business process. But what we need most is analytical CRM which has the ability of analyzing and abstracting data from different kinds of data source to produce customer intelligence and support decision making. Actually, the concepts of date-warehousing, OLAP and data-mining are had been put forward for a long time, but putting them together and naming it BI, business intelligence was the thing happened only two or there years ago. Now what we are discussing is how to use business intelligence to build analytical CRM.In this article, I first discussed the importance of customer relationship management from the view of customer lifetime value (LTV). In the case of Fast Lube, I compared the difference of LTV before or after the customer retentionstrategy had been carried out. After that, the technology structure and current usage of CRM system was described. The article pointed out the main shortcomings of operational CRM which is it can not understand the real needs of customer and can not help us carry out pertinent business measures. Form the view of ROI, return of investment, the article discussed the advantages of analytical CRM in the aspect of improving customer profitability and drew the conclusion of analytical CRM was the direction of CRM system. At last, the article discussed the problem of how to use business intelligence to build analytical CRM through a lot of cases and recourses.* From the technologies of business intelligenceFirstly, we should build customer information data warehouse to abstract and transform data from different recourses to make to following steps easier; secondly, we can use query & reports or OLAP to solve verification problems related to customer relationship management; finally, we can use data-mining to solve the discovery problems, that is, discover unknown information from mass data and predict the future.* From the applied fields of CRMGenerally speaking, business int... |
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