week 11 blog questions

Week Eleven - Weekly Questions

Customer Relationship Management & Business Intelligence

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 organisations profitability.

2.    Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM supports traditional transactional processing for day-today 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 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: (1) list generator, (2) campaign management and (3) cross-selling and up selling. The first component, list generators, compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns. Secondly, campaign management systems guide users through marketing campaigns performing such tasks as campaign definition, planning, scheduling, segmentation and success analysis. Lastly, cross-selling is selling additional products or services to a customer. While up-selling is increasing the value of the sale. E.g. would you like fries with that (maccas).
 Alternatively, the three primary operational CRM technologies a sales department can implement to increase customer satisfaction are: (1) sales management CRM systems, (2) contact management CRM systems, and (3) opportunity management CRM systems. The first of the three elements, sales management CRM systems, automates each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organize all their accounts. Secondly, contact management CRM systems, maintain customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales. The last element, opportunity management CRM systems, target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales. Opportunity management systems determine potential customers and competitors and define selling efforts, including budgets and schedules.  

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

The three primary operational CRM technologies a sales department can implement are: (1) sales management CRM systems, (2) contact management CRM systems, and (3) opportunity management CRM systems. The first of the three elements, sales management CRM systems, automates each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organize all their accounts. Secondly, contact management CRM systems, maintain customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales. The last element, opportunity management CRM systems, target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales. Opportunity management systems determine potential customers and competitors and define selling efforts, including budgets and schedules.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgVJHCQ5_0A&feature=pyv&ad=7061151011&kw=CRM

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 analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts. BI is a valuable attribute to business due to its roles in:

·         Collecting information

·         Discerning patterns and meaning in the information

·         Responding to the resultant information

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

The problem stated simply is data rich, information poor. With all the data available in business nowadays, it is surprising how difficult it is for managers to get a clear picture of fundamental business information, such as inventory levels, orders in the pipeline or client history. As a result, information has to be requested from different departments or IT, who must then dedicate staff, resources and time trying to find and decipher data to provide rich information that is helpful to the manager of the business. With this knowledge, it can then be conveyed to employees whom gain knowledge that can be leveraged to increase company profitability.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqpMyQMi0to

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 approaches decision making with a few different activities in mind, including: (a) Classification, in which records are assigned to one of a predefined set of classes. (b) Estimation, where values are determined for an unknown continuous variable behaviour or estimated future value. (c) Affinity grouping, basically determines which things correlate with each other. (d) Clustering, involves segmenting a heterogeneous population of records into a number of more homogeneous subgroups.