Components of Analytical CRM  

Data Warehousing

Data warehousing technology and a comprehensive customer data warehouse are keys to making analytical CRM work. Ideally, there should be a single customer repository for all transactions, behaviors, preferences, customer profitability and valuation, and segmentation treatments - but the reality is that most organizations have created silos of data and it will not be easy to coordinate all of the sources initially. Data warehousing technologies include the extract, transformation and load (ETL) functions to move data in and out of legacy systems and disparate data marts into the comprehensive customer data warehouse.

Data Enhancement

This is a broad category consisting of data cleansing, data enhancement and customer profitability. Data cleansing includes cleaning up, standardizing and linking the data as it is loaded from the legacy systems. Data enhancement involves adding external data such as demographic or spatial information. Customer profitability is the application of identifying historical, current and projected value of your customers and then using it to improve segmentation and to implement customer strategies. Customer profitability analysis is one of the most important and underappreciated components of analytical CRM.

Data Mining, Personalization and Segmentation

These solutions are related but are sometimes perceived as vastly different because of how they arrive at their answers. Ultimately, they are performing the same task - using various modeling techniques to predict, tailor and present customers with better messages and increase the odds of acceptance.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence solutions range from ad hoc query and OLAP analysis to portals, standardized reports and balanced scorecards. Business intelligence provides users with access to the customer information and will be different for different types of users. Business intelligence is the window into understanding the analytical information.

Marketing

The marketing or campaign management application is generally seen as the link between the analytical and operational worlds. The marketing application manages the marketing process by creating, executing and tracking offline batch and real-time offers to customers. The execution of marketing offers is the link into the operational or customer-facing CRM solutions and the reason marketing is sometimes seen as the Trojan Horse of the traditional CRM world.

Data Movement, Workflow and Integration into other CRM Applications

This last category is the glue that will connect the analytical and operational solutions into a cohesive and seamless total solution. Without getting into too many details, the emergence of XML as a standard for integration will be a huge enabler. Workflow and business-rule driven capabilities are also key. Ultimately, suites of CRM applications will dominate the landscape and minimize the integration issues - but it will take time and money to swap existing systems for new systems.

(Humbarger, 2002)