Data Warehousing and CRM
Fiercer competition has forced many companies in pay greater
attention to retaining customers and winning new ones. Customer loyalty programs
have become the Norm Companies at moving away front mass marketing to one-on-one
marketing. Custom focus has become the watchword. Concentration on customer
experience and custom intimacy has become the key to better customer service.
More and more companies embracing customer relationship management ((RM)
systems. A number of leading vendors offer turnkey CM solutions that promise to
enable one-on-one service to customers.
Integrated Data Warehouse- Knowledge Repository
Figure 3-8 Integration KM and Data Warehouse
When your company is gearing up to be more attuned to high
levels of customer ser-vice, what Can you, as a data warehouse architect, do'?
II' you already have a data \yore-house. how must you readjust it? If you are
building a new data warehouse, what arc the factors for special emphasis? You
will have to make your data warehouse more focused on the customer. YOU will
haVe to make your data warehouse CRM-ready, not an easy task by ally means. In
spite of the difficulties, the payoff from a CM-ready data warehouse is
substantial.
CRM-Ready Data Warehouse: - Your data warehouse must hold
details of every transaction at every touch point with each customer. This
means every unit of every sale of every product to every customer must be
gathered in the data warehouse repository. Yon not only need sales data in
detail but also details of every other type of encounter with each customer In
addition to summary data, you have to load every encounter with every customer
in the data warehouse. Atomic or detailed data provides maximum flexibility for
the CRM-Ready data warehouse. Making
your data warehouse CRM-Ready will increase the data volumes tremendously.
Fortunately, today's technology facilitates large volumes of atomic data to be
placed across multiple storage management devices that can be accessed through
common data warehouse tools.
To make your data warehouse CM-ready, you have
to enhance some other functions also. For customer-related data, cleansing and
transformation functions are more involved and complex. Before taking the
customer name and address records to the data ware-house, you have to parse
unstructured (Iota to eliminate duplicates.
Combine them to from distinct households, and enrich them with
external demographic and psycho-graphic data, these are major efforts.
Traditional data warehousing tools are not quite suited for the specialized
requirements of customer-focused applications.