Customer's behaviour knowledge to better practices of CRM
Authors
Abstract
Customer's relationship management (CRM) is the result of marketing and information technologies integration. It is one of the most sophisticated and efficient management methods, which augments the actual customers' profitability. Nowadays, the major challenge faced by organisations is to know how the buyers of their products or services typically behave, so they can anticipate their requests, attempt to influence their behaviour, attract new customers or prepare the organisation to a better service.To implement CRM, the organisations must know, exactly, who is the customer of their business and to acquire and manage the customers behaviour knowledge (CBK),
Traditionally, CBK is obtained with market research; this method is based on presumptions that can not be correct and it does not consider the customer's behaviour in the past.
Nowadays, the transactions (e.g., the purchases and the search of information) the customers carry out with the organisations either through sites B2c and B2B, Call Centres or through their points-of-sale, are stored in operational databases. If the contents of these databases are used, those problems do not subsist because this knowledge is reliable as it is referred to objective facts and it is stored and updated daily, allowing to obtain the evolution of the customer's behaviour with appropriate technologies, namely data mining tools.
CBK develops along the time; therefore, it has vital importance for the business management that the organisation takes care of this knowledge and its evolution, guaranteeing that is of quality, updated and that the organisational members can use it; this can be done with appropriated knowledge systems. If the organisation knows that evolution, it will rethink their activities of CRM.