Week Ten B.I.T

 Week Ten - CRM & BI

1. What is your understanding of CRM?

Customer relationship management is a business strategy for managing a company's interactions with clients and sales prospects. CRM is beneficial to a business as it can increase customer loyalty and retention, which increases the profitability of an organisation. By appearing as friendlier businesses retain existing customers which is cheaper than finding new customers

2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM is short term operational data that assists in processing the day to day operations or systems that interact with customers. An example of an operational CRM system is Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It is designed to integrate with Microsoft programs.
Analytical CRM uses operational data to establish trends within customers (data mining). Analytical CRM also focuses on long term customer relationship trends. This enables a business to gain an idea of customer needs and whether they are being achieved.

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

Sales Department

The sales department works to increase the volume of sales and meet current sales quotas. The sales department is focused on the short term as they use their skills to sell todays customers.
Sales force automation (SFA) - a system that automatically tracks the steps in the sales process. Focuses on increasing customer satisfaction, building customer relationships and improving product sales by tracking all sales information.


Marketing Department

List generators - compiles customer information from a variety of sources. E.g. questionnaires, website visits, etc. Once information is gathered a company can sort and filter it. A list generator enables a business to make strategic decisions.
Compaign management systems - guides users through marketing campaigns performing tasks e.g. scheduling. Campaign management systems incorporate the cost associated with campaigns, cost of inventory and the amount of customer sales.Cross selling and up selling - Cross selling offers an additional product or service. E.g. a matching tie for a shirt. Up selling increases the value of a sale. E.g. upsizing a meal at McDonalds

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

Operational CRM technologies assist in the day to day operations of a business. Campaign management for example provides information upon scheduling and systems can be established for upselling and cross selling to maximises profits.

5. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence is data that can be gained from technology which can be used for strategic decision making by analysing the data to find patterns and trends. Business intelligence is important as it enables sound business decisions necessary for the business' survival.

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

The biggest problem with business intelligence is the large amount of data that can be gathered. Data, however, is useless until it is analysed and becomes information. The sheer amount of data makes this a difficult process. Businesses must ensure that they have the adequate resources and tools to interrupt data. 

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

Data mining is the application of statistical techniques to find patterns and relationships among data and to classify and predict. Data mining may increase profits as it reveals trends that can be targeted by future marketing campaigns. Data mining also highlights trends which may indicate where the company can best allocate its resources int he future.