Business Intelligence
Anyone who has been following the stream of press releases issued by CRM and customer interaction companies this year knows that analytic applications vendors are quickly merging with customer intelligence and CRM providers. If companies are not privy to changes in their corporate landscape, they are likely to be blindsided. The convergence of BI (business intelligence) and the Internet—or e-solutions—is the critical next step to supplying company infrastructures with the decision-making capabilities and Web-enablement they need to move forward in e-business. From a BI standpoint, clients leverage their ERP investment by pulling information from that system into a separate, organized intelligent structure from which educated decisions can be made. This information helps them leverage their new Internet site with their existing data warehouse to create the overall infrastructure needed to support and supply BI information for CRM initiatives. Companies must continually gather information about their competitors to stay at the top of their game. Software is used to collect data daily and store it in a data warehouse.
This type of analytic application provides CRM and BI solutions with three key capabilities:
The ability to quantify the value of the customer interaction.
The ability to set thresholds to trigger rules and events, e.g., automate the delivery of specific content such as personalized offers and product recommendations.
The ability to help qualify customer information.
A data warehouse is a large analytical database that can serve as the foundation for BI activities. Data warehousing is a process supported by a number of underlying enabling technologies such as data extraction, transformation, and load tools. The underlying framework is the data store that is built on popular database engines like Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle both supporting OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) technology. The data extraction on the surface uses ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Load) software. Some of the current ETL software include Cognos, Microsoft DTS, and Informatica.
Data mining can best be described as a BI technology that has various techniques to extract comprehensible, hidden, and useful information from a population of data. Data mining makes it possible to discover hidden trends and patterns in large amounts of data. The current technology for this is data analyzers; these can be integrated with your CRM suite, like Oracle's Performance Analyzer that generates data and makes it available to your CRM application, or others like Computer Associates' Intelligent CRM Suite is a comprehensive and intelligent e-business solution comprised of modules that include customer intelligence. Whichever you choose, being able to not only detect trends, but make future decisions based on competitive information will leverage your company into greater profits.