Analytical Competition for Managing Customer Relations
FUTURE TRENDS
Data mining is a modern technology that offers competi-
tive firms a method to manage customer information, to
retain customers, and to pursue new and hopefully prof-
itable customer relationships. With the emergence new
technologies, data mining has been further enhanced
and segregated into text mining and web mining.
Text Mining
With the advancement and expansion of data mining
there is a large scope and need of an area which can serve
the purpose various domains. Fusion of techniques from
data mining, language, information process retrieval
and visual understanding, created an interdisciplinary
field called text mining. Text data mining, referred as,
text mining is the process of extracting the information
from an unstructured text. In order to obtain high text
information, a process of pattern division and trends is
done. For an efficient text mining system, the unstruc-
tured text is parsed and attached or removed some level
of linguistic feature, thus making it structured text. A
standard text mining approach will involve categoriza-
tion of text, text clustering, and extraction of concepts,
granular taxonomies production, sentiment analysis,
document summarization, and modeling.
Text mining involves a two stage processing of
text. In the first step a description of document and its
content is done. This process is called categorization
process. In the second step, called as classification, the
document is divided into descriptive categories and an
inter document relationship is established. Of the late,
text mining has been useful in many areas, i.e. security
applications, software applications, academic applica-
tions etc. In the competitive world of business, there is a
rush to grab the pie of text mining benefits. With every
company focusing on customer relationship manage-
ment the need for a technique to analyze the customer
response in an efficient and effective ways is in demand.
This is where text mining fills in the void.
Companies generally concentrate in a smaller quan-
titative picture of customer response and thus neglecting
a broader perspective of CRM. Furthermore, people
managing CRM do not put a heed to the day to day
communications, suggestions, complaints and praises.
This leads to further weaken the CR analysis. With the
use of text mining a link to the behavioral data can be
obtained which will be an additional asset to the stan-

dard numerical analysis. With the involvement of text
mining which in itself involves artificial intelligence,
machine learning and statistics can be very useful in
predicting the future course of customer relationship
management.
Web Mining
With the explosion of information we are entering into
a flood of information. This information explosion is
strongly supported by the internet which by all means
has become a universal infrastructure of information
(Abbasi & Chen, 2007; Turekten & Sharda, 2007). With
the fact that web content is exponentially increasing
it is getting difficult day by day to get the appropriate
information which is as close as possible to what a user
is looking for. Web mining can be used in customizing
the web sites based on the contents as well as the user
interaction. Types of web mining generally include
usage mining, content mining and structure mining.
Data mining, text mining and web mining employ
many techniques to extract relevant information from
massive data sources so that companies can make better
business decisions with regard to their customer rela-
tionships. Hence, data, text mining and web mining
promote the goals of customer relationship manage-
ment, which are to initiate, develop, and personalize
customer relationships by profiling customers and
highlighting segments.
However, data mining presents a number of issues
that must be addressed. Data privacy is a trigger-but-
ton issue (Atahan & Sarkar, 2007; Zhu et al., 2007).
Recently, privacy violations, complaints, and concerns
have grown in significance as merchants, companies,
and governments continue to accumulate and store
large amounts of personal data. There are concerns not
only about the collection of personal data, but also the
analyses and uses of the data. For example, transac-
tional information is collected from the customer for
the processing of a credit card payment, then, without
prior notification, the information is used for other
purposes (e.g., data mining). This action would vio-
late principles of data privacy. Fueled by the public’s
concerns about the rising volume of collected data and
potent technologies, clashes between data privacy and
data mining likely will cause higher levels of scrutiny
in the coming years. Legal challenges are quite possible
in this regard.