Week 2

Too many things to do last week, therefore totally forgot the blog staff. Sorry, Rob, help you can forgive me this time. Anyway, my blog is finally been set up, hope everyone would enjoy it.

This week I was reading the "Analytical CRM Powers Profitable Relationships: Creating Success by Letting Customers Guide You" by Ron Swift. The journal is talking about with analytical CRM, an enterprise-class data warehouse and a disciplined knowledge creation process could increase the business's profits, opportunities, and also the customer loyalty.

Since the 1980s, companies around the world start using data warehouse technology to understand their customer better. But the issues is some companies only implement department-level database, it actually leads to a incomplete picture of the customer relationship and sometimes drives corresponding miscommunication. Therefore, the idea of enterprise-level database is to include all customer transactions, all interactions, all customer denials, all service history, new characteristics and profiles, interactive survey data, clickstream/browsing behavior (from tracking systems), cross and direct references, external and internal demographics, psychographics and, in fact, all available and useful data surrounding each customer. This may also include data from outside the business.

Then after all the customer's data been collected, the CRM intelligence management cycle comes in. It is a four-step process which include:

1. Collection - This means collecting all customer interaction data as well as transactions to manage the complete depth and breadth of the customer relationship.
2. Analysis - business using tools and resource to analysis the customer data in three different area.

• Customer behavior and preferences
• Operational factors
• Financial factors

3. Action - Treat different customer differently, according to their need. For example, using different type of communication channels for different types of customers.

4. Measure - organization must measure the effectiveness and impact of its CRM activities.

In conclusion, CRM can help business to communicate with their customers and have a consistent and accurate view on them, in order to move them up the value chain. And enable the business to allocate resource to the highest priorities.