Managing Customer Data is Key to the Future
Change Is the Only Constant in Today's Business Environment
Sep 19, 2009
A key challenge to business today is implementing an information infrastructure that enables rapid responses to competitive pressures and the capability to survive into the future.
Corporate strategies which impact customer relationships and the management and application of customer data to s business operation- CRM for short- are dependent on an information superstructure comprised of various technologies that enable organizations to store, access, analyze, and manipulate vast amounts of customer data. Most organizations with large numbers of customers to manage, frequently in the thousands or millions, require a combination of sophisticated technologies to implement CRM.
Major Contributing Technologies
The four major contributung technologies to CRM are:
- Data warehousing
- Database management systems
- Data mining
- Business analysis software
Within each of these major technology areas there are subsets of system and application software to handle a range of CRM-oriented functions, such as:
- Data storage
- Database queries
- Value analysis
- Mathematical models for predictive analysis
- Analytics
All of these applications contribute to the CRM solution by enabling organizations to collect, store,and analyze data based on a wide range of parameters.
Existing and New Data
Most companies have data stored in a variety of database systems, on both legacy mainframes and client/server networks. An effective data warehouse design and implementation will enable users to mine the vast amounts of data that has been and will be accumulated within the enterprise, to make the most of existing data and collect new data on an on-going basis. It will enable organizations to gather, store, manipulate and analyze large volumes of customer transaction data to provide valuable business information on the customer database.
Data warehouses have become well-accepted in many business sectors and in companies within these sectors, as a core component of doing business, as well as building blocks for a corporate CRM strategy. This technology is a prerequisite for the level of one-on-one customer relationships that can turn information into a company's most important resource. Melding all of the related technologies into a comprehensive CRM infrastructure that will meet a corporations' s business needs, is the challenge faced by the project team charged with the responsibility for developing the CRM strategy, and this challenge begins within the data warehousing project.
Data Warehouse Benefits
Many companies that have successfully implemented data warehouses have discovered that the use of this technology has resulted in millions of dollars in savings, as well as increased profitability, not to mention improved customer relations, once it has been deeply integrated into their business processes to become a mission-critical system, and even before it has become part of a full-fledged corporate CRM strategy.
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