401 E-Customer Relationship Management

E Customer Relationship Management
 Know Your Customer
 Building Loyalty & Retention in Digital world
 Data Warehousing & Mining
 Digital Communities(Blogs Forum/FB pages)
 Handling Customer Complaints
 Customer Experience in Digital World
Objectives
After going through this unit, you will be able to:
 Understand the importance of knowing customers

 Know about concept of segmentation, targeting and positioning
 Learn about different types of customers on the net
 Know what is up selling and cross selling.
 Be aware of operational, collaborative & analytical CRM.
 Discuss the concept of community
 Describe how to build partnership through community
 Analyse user generated content
 Explain the concept of blog

 Discuss the importance attached to customer complaints
 State the reasons behind customer complaints
 Explain how complaints can act for the betterment of an organisation
 Elaborate on how to manage a complaint handling system
 Discuss the concepts of customer experience management
 Describe the importance of CEM
Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

 Describe challenges to a digital marketer in creating a better customer experience
management
 Elaborate the steps of a good customer experience management process
 Evaluate why the people factor is the most important in CEM
KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER
Marketing is changing meaningfully in relation to the product, market segment, customer

psychographics (psychological characteristics), geo-demographics (geo = geographical and
demographic = study of the statistics of birth, death, disease etc.) and many other aspects. It
is evolving for the better and is becoming pro-consumer. Every business must have its
customer at its core nucleus or else it has “no business to be in business”.
A customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of
a good, service, product, or idea, obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier for a monetary or
other valuable consideration.
In the digital environment where the physical connect between buyer and seller is not present
it is all the more necessary for organisations to know their customers and understanding
customer needs. This is an aspect of CRM that needs to be understood well and embedded
deep into the culture of an organisation and its business philosophy as well. To understand a
customer well one must begin with studying customer complaints and customer feedback.
This helps you to understand your customer and also to read your organisation better through
its customer feedback.
The first step to know your customer better is to understand the concepts related to the
targeting, attracting and acquiring new customer. In this module we will also understand the
concepts associated with Customer demographics, Preferences and buying habits of
customers, psychological aspect of interactions in digital space and different types of
customers.
Targeting, Attracting and Acquiring New Customer
The process of dividing a market into subsets or segments of consumers with common needs,
goals, characteristics, with the goal of selecting one or more segments to target with a distinct
marketing mix is known as Segmentation.

If all consumers were alike – same needs, wants, backgrounds, personalities, and cultures –
mass (undifferentiated) marketing would be a very viable and successful strategy. Its primary
advantage is that it costs less: one standard product, one advertisement campaign and only
one distribution or packaging strategy. But most marketers see a drawback in this shotgun
approach, because in trying to satisfy everyone with one standard undifferentiated product,
they end up satisfying, most of the customers partially.
This does not mean that mass marketing is dead; it still has its relevance in certain markets.
Even in such markets, marketers practice a modified version of mass marketing by focusing
on customer needs and adapting products to evolving needs.
Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning
Target Positioning
Segmentation market (Marketing
selection mix)
Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning (STP) is the logical and strategic outcome of a market

segmentation strategy. After segmenting the market into homogenous clusters, the marketer
must select one or more segments to target. To achieve this marketer must decide on a
specific marketing mix – that is specific product, price, channel (place) and promotional
appeal for each distinct segment. The third step is positioning the product in the consumers
mind, so that it is perceived by the customer as satisfying his needs better than other
competitive offerings.
The STP strategy benefits both consumers and companies alike and is widely practiced in
industries. Consumer goods companies have for long been practitioners of STP; but of late
even financial services, banks, educational institutions, retailers, hospitality industry,
pharmaceutical industry, hospitals, media and even non-profit organisations have all adopted
a market segmentation approach. Even companies operating in a B2B market place are
segmenting markets.
Segmentation studies are designed to discover the needs and wants of specific groups of
consumers so that specialised goods and services can be developed to satisfy their needs.

Many new products have been developed to fill gaps in the market place revealed by
segmentation research.
The segmentation is generally carried out on the basis of following 4 categories.

1. Geographic – based on geographical location
2. Psychographic – Based on personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.
3. Behavioral Economics – Based on economic profile of the consumers
4. Demographics – Based on the vital and measurable statistics of the population
In a digital environment the consumer location barriers have been broken. The seller and
buyer are not required to be located in a similar geographical location which was needed in a
traditional selling mode.
THE DIGITAL MARKET SEGMENTATION PROCESS

The process is continuous and follows four different stages: Survey, Analysis of findings,
Segment Profiling and Feasibility. In a digital market these stages need not necessarily be
sequential and will at times overlap.
1. Survey: This stage consists of extensive consumer research, as marketers try to gather
extensive quantitative and qualitative information about consumer buying motives,
consumption goals and buying patterns. At this stage, marketers use the segmentation
variables we studied earlier to gain an understanding of consumer behaviour. Various
research methodologies are used to gain extensive information on consumer behaviour.
2. Analysis of Findings: The data gathered has to be collated in a meaningful way and
analysed. The aim of the analysis is to identify need gaps in the market, emergence of new
buying patterns, shift in consumer perceptions, attitudes, values and any other changes, which
may represent opportunities.
Effective analysis will provide a rich understanding of consumer needs, whether present
unmet needs, latent needs or newer needs as they emerge.
3. Segment Profiling: Most companies use a hybrid segmentation approach, segment
profiling becomes a part of the earlier stages. At this stage, market may try to find additional

information about the observed segments, such as media habits, ownership of durables,
spending patterns on other related categories to gain a detailed understanding of the segment.
Profiling is an important input the designing the marketing mix, especially the
communication and distribution program.
4. Evaluating Segment Attractiveness: The last stage of the segmentation process, before
the marketers decide on segment(s) to target, is a detailed feasibility study of the different
market segments. The first step is to use the five criteria, we learnt earlier, to determine
attractiveness. The segment may pass the first test, but marketers need to look at long-term
profit attractiveness of a segment as well.
Additional criteria for segment attractiveness are:

1. Expected market growth rate. Unstable growth rates do not make for long-term
attractiveness of the segment.
2. Competitive intensity and other competitive forces. A “five forces” analysis can be
done on market segments as well to determine profit attractiveness.
3. Segment Development Costs; emerging market segments would require market
development efforts. Marketers must account for these costs to determine the
feasibility of targeting a segment.
4. Availability of resources
5. Leveraging of existing competitive advantage and skills and competencies.
6. Impact of either environmental forces on the market segment
7. Impact on other market segments presently being targeted by the company.
Sometimes attractive segments may not mesh with the companies long-run objectives or the
company may lack a competitive advantage and necessary competencies to offer superior
value to the customers.
Check your Progress 1

Fill in the blanks
1. _________ is repetitive behaviour resulting as an absence of Information seeking, and

Evaluation of alternative choices.
2. _________ trends can reveal opportunities such as shifts in age, gender and income
distribution.

Types of Customers
e-tailers should take a moment to recognize that not all online shoppers are created alike.
Different types of Web shoppers have different goals and shopping strategies.
Creating Digital profile of customers - personalities
What is the single most important element of your digital marketing campaign? No, it’s not
your budget, nor the channels you choose. – It’s your customers. One very effective tool to
identify the targeted segment is by creating personalities. This helps the marketers to explore
deep inside the customer’s psyche – getting to grasps with their needs, desires, wants,
motivations and behaviours.
This identified and sharply focused segmentation helps in getting a clear understanding of what
makes your customers tick and click is an essential component of any digital marketing
campaign. This can significantly enhance digital marketing tactics by:
 Allowing you to keep focused on your audience’s needs and wants.
 Enriching the emotional impact of your content and campaign creative.
 Informing your overall digital marketing strategy and digital channel selection.
 Enabling you to create a superior user experience for your website design, navigation and
copy.
 Helping you to personalize and tailor your content and email campaigns.
 Enabling you to look at (and solve) problems from your audience’s perspective.
The popular steps to create a person are,
Create a standard template for capturing required information about the customer.
Step 1 – Name It
Give your persona a unique name that resonates with your target audience.

Step 2 – Picture It
Choose a fitting picture for your personality that matches your personality’s demographics and
energy.
Step 3 – Answer It
Answer a series of insightful questions that include everything from your personality’s job and
interests to their motivations and key day-to-day challenges.
Step 4 – Create it online and Download
How You Can Use Your Personalities:
Content Strategy
“Once you have identified whom your buyer personality are, you can’t stop there. Your
business will only see the benefits once you implement them into your marketing strategy. You
need to look at your content strategy and ensure that the messaging in every asset you create
resonates with that personality’s needs and challenges as well as where they are at in the buying
cycle.”
Introduce Your Personality to Your Organisation
“You also need to introduce your personality to the entire organisation so that everyone from
sales to customer support understands the needs and challenges your customers face in order to
serve them better.”
Revisit Regularly
“It’s important to remember that the goal of creating buyer personalities is to help us create
marketing that attracts the right people to our business and turn them into happy and loyal
customers. Therefore, it should not be viewed as a tactic or something on your to-do list, but an
ongoing strategy that your business adopts to ensure its growth and long-term success.”

Additional Tips for Using Personalities:
 Form the digital marketing plan/strategy based on the needs and desires of your
personalities.
 Use your personality insights when creating campaign concepts/ideas and taglines.
 Consult your personalities when crafting your content calendar and before creating each
post.
 Take your personalities with you into brainstorming meetings and ask yourself what would
Jane (insert name of your personality) do or need in this situation?
 Introduce them to your sales team to help them understand who they are selling to and what
they need to hear.
 Segment buyer personalities and tailor your emails with a relevant message that appeals to
their interests.
 Take a print and pin your created personalities to your office wall to remind you of whom
you are marketing to.
Six basic types of online shoppers are,
'New to the Net' Shopper
'New to the Net' Shopper are those who are new to the Net are still trying to grasp the concept
of e-commerce. They typically use the Web to research purchases, and are likely to start
buying online with small purchases in safe categories
Customer’s needs - New-to-the-Net shoppers require a very simple interface, an easy

checkout process and lots of validation to buy online. Product pictures will do a lot to
convince these shoppers to complete sales transactions. Shopper-to-shopper interaction will
also provide a non-threatening way for Web newbies to learn their way around and gain
confidence in making online shopping.

Reluctant Shopper
Reluctant shoppers are nervous about security and privacy issues. Because of their fears, they
start off wanting to use the Web only to research purchases, rather than buy online
Customer’s needs - Clearly stated security and privacy policies will help reluctant shoppers
feel comfortable with the Web. These shoppers also need immediate online customer support
to quell their concerns. Online discussions with other shoppers who report positive
experiences of buying online will also help reassure them.
Bargain Hunter
Bargain hunting shoppers use comparison shopping tools extensively. Sporting no brand
loyalty, these shoppers are just looking for the lowest price.
Customer’s needs - Retailers must convince these shoppers that they are getting the best
price and do not need to continue searching online or offline for a better deal. Sale-priced
items listed on the site, or made available through an operator, are very attractive to these.
Surgical shopper
Shoppers know exactly what they want before logging online and only purchase that item.
Typically they know the criteria on which they will base their decision, seek information to
match against that criteria, and purchase when they are confident they have found exactly the
right product.
Customer needs - Product configurators and archived opinions are essential to persuade
surgical shoppers that what they found is what they need. These shoppers also benefit from
quick access to insights from other shoppers' experiences and real time customer service from
knowledgeable operators.
Enthusiast Shopper
Enthusiast Shopper use shopping as a form of recreation. They purchase frequently and are
the most adventurous shoppers
Customer needs - It is important to cater to the fun-loving character of the enthusiast

shoppers. To fuel their enjoyment, Web sites should offer them engaging tools to view the

merchandise, personalized product recommendations, and community applications such as
bulletin boards and customer feedback pages
Power shopper
Power shopper shop out of necessity, rather than as a form of recreation. They develop
sophisticated shopping strategies to find what they want, and do not want to waste time
looking around.
Customer needs - Sites that have excellent navigation tools and offer lots of information on
the available products -- customer experiences, expert opinions and customer service -- are
attractive to power shoppers. These shoppers want instant access to information and support,
and expect highly relevant product recommendations that match their criteria.
Market Research to Know your Customer
A good market research campaign plays an important role in a successful marketing initiative
by giving you’re the information that you need to focus in on your audience and content. The
market research needed to support a digital marketing initiative has two main focuses:
1. Interpreting your audience’s most urgent concern: Understanding your audience has
profound implications for your marketing strategy and beyond. From the perspective
of developing your content and digital marketing strategy, it helps you answer vital
questions such as: who are your customers? What are their most urgent and pressing
concerns? What factors are they focused on in terms of making a buying decision.
This information helps you decide what strategy will reach them most effectively on
every point from design and copy to keyword research and content deployment.
2. Focusing your content: Determining how your audience finds your site, what they
read, and more is the core of a successful content marketing strategy
It’s fair to say that this information can have far more reaching impact on the way to do
business. But it helps to understand the ways that businesses gather this information.
Some of the popular techniques of online research to know customer are,
Keyword research: The world of keyword research is constantly evolving. What information
are Google and Bing making available? What’s the best tool to dig in? Understanding what

keywords matter for your space and how people are currently finding your site is invaluable
information.
Website analytics: Your website analytics program, such as Google Analytics, can tell you a
lot about your visitors. What’s their demographic information, what’s bringing them to your
site, and what do they do once they’re there? Mining your website analytics can help fill in
the picture of where the gaps exist in your online marketing strategy.
PPC-based research: Using Google AdWords to test concepts and gauge interest in products
and services – as well as refine the messaging in connection with these aspects of your
business– is a smart strategy.
Auditing existing buyer data: You probably store a lot of information about existing
customers, including who they are, how they buy, what they buy, when and where they buy,
and what triggers that action. Mining your existing data will give you a very solid picture of
who you’re selling to and the kinds of areas to focus in on in your research.
A/B testing: A/B testing is a kind of data gathering that lets you determine what’s most
effective for reaching your audience. It can focus on e-newsletter headlines, designs for the
landing page of your website, or the specific copy of a call to action. By pitting two options
against each other, you’re able to determine which performs better and make incremental
improvements to your website and overall marketing strategy.
Introduction to Operational, Collaborative and Analytical CRM
There are three segments of CRM as follows with their features:
(a) Operational CRM:
1. Operational CRM is an ERP like segment of CRM.
2. Typical business functions involving customer service, order management, invoice or

billing or sales and marketing automation and management are the parts of
operational CRM.
3. It provides support to “Front Office” business processes, including sales, marketing

and service.

4. Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer’s contact history,
and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database when necessary.
5. One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact with
different people or different contact channels in a company over time without having
to describe the history of their interaction each time.
6. It process customer data for a variety of purposes such as managing campaigns,

Enterprise Marketing Automation (EMA) and Sales Force Automation (SFA).
7. Till now, this is the primary use of CRM. One characteristic of operational CRM is
the possibility of integrating with the financial and human resources functions of ERP
applications.
8. With this integration, end-to-end functionality from lead management to order

breaking can be implemented.
(b) Analytical CRM
1. Analytical CRM is the capture, storage, extraction, processing, interpretation and

recording customer data to the user.
2. Companies such as Micro Strategy have developed applications that can capture this
customer data from multiple resources and then use hundreds of algorithms to analyze
and interpret the data as needed.
3. The value of the application is not just in algorithm and storage, but also in ability to
individually personalize the response using the data.
4. It generally makes heavy use of data mining.
5. It analyzes customer data for the following purposes.
(a) Design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimize marketing

effectiveness.
(b) Design and execution of specific customer campaigns.
(c) Analysis of customer behavior to aid product and service decision-making such as
pricing etc.

(d) Aid in taking management decisions such as financial forecasting.
(e) Provide a tool in predicting the probability of customer defection.
(c) Collaborative CRM
1. It is the communication center, coordination network that provides neural paths to

customer and its suppliers.
2. It could mean a partner relationship management [PRM] application or a customer

interaction center.
3. It could mean communication channels such as web or e-mail, voice applications and
even channel strategies.
4. In other words, it is any CRM function that provides a point of interaction between
customer and the channel itself.

Fill in the blanks.
1. __________implies selling something that is more profitable but also simply exposing the
customer to other options he or she may not have considered previously.
1. ___________ is the process of extracting new knowledge, previously undetected, selected
from databases for actionable decisions.
CUSTOMER LOYALTY AND RETENTION
The new marketing is aimed at winning customers forever, where companies greet the
customers, create the product to suit their needs and work hard to develop lifetime customer
through the principle of “Customer delight”. The success of any business depends solely on
the quality of product and/or service and customer organisation relationship. Instead of
running after the customer, there is need to run with the customer.
The relationship between the customer and the business firm has been consistently
encouraging as a successful business practice.
Technology, People and Customer are the three elements on which hinge the success of any
organisation depends in today’s fast changing economic environment. e-CRM which is the
latest buzzword in the corporate sector is perceived as one of the effective & efficient toll for

relationship management. Its emphasis is on defining the customers as valuable in the long
term and on viewing customer relationships as learning relationship.
Businesses are shifting from being product centric to customer centric companies try to have
personal relationship with their customers. Moving towards customer centric approach is a
multi-prolonged effort and that requires transformation of process, culture & strategy from
top level to every individual employee.
Maintaining customer is one of the significant skills to maintain any business. It is a best
approach for winning, retaining & servicing of customers.
Companies are using technology development as an opportunity to reduce customer service
cost, improve customer relationship & most important further personalize marketing
messages and enable customization.
Electronic CRM (e-CRM) concerns all forms of managing relationship with the customer by
use of Information Technology (IT).
In simple words, e-CRM provides organisation a means to conduct interactive personalized
and relevant communication with customers across both electronic & traditional channels.
It utilizes a complete view of the customer to make decisions about messaging, offers and
channel delivery. e-CRM can also be defined as activities to manage customer relationships
by using the internet, web browsers or other electronic ways.
IMPORTANCE OF TRUST AND FOCUSING ON THE “RIGHT” CUSTOMER

Trust of the customer on the organisation and its products and services is one of the important
parameter for retention of customer. Use of CRM techniques is the best way for retention of
customer and creating trust among the customers.
The important issue for an e-commerce organisation is to ensure that they are focusing on the
right customer.
The right customer is one who is providing better realisations and profits to the marketer. The
marketer is able to upsell and cross and is able to gather maximum wallet share.
The Perato principle of focusing on 20% customer who provide 80% of revenue and profit is
a good test of identifying the right customer.
Right customer is also important from the targeted group perspective also. The e-retailer has
to be very right in segmenting the market and identifying the right customer to be focus on.
Focusing the right customer by e-CRM is the best way to have customer loyalty. In today’s
competitive world where business has become customer centric, keeping pace with the
customers and maintaining relationship with them is required. Focusing on the right customer

is the requirement of today. Creating trust for the brand, its products and services and
focusing on the right customer is most important. This can be done more effectively by the
Electronic Customer Relationship Management.

Fill in the blanks.
1. Trust of the customer on the organisation and its products and services is one of the important
parameters for _______________.
ONLINE CUSTOMER LOYALTY

Customer loyalty describes the tendency of a customer to prefer and choose one business or
product over another for a particular need. In the packaged goods industry, customers may be
described as being “brand loyal” because they tend to choose a certain brand of soap more
often than others. Note the use of the word “choose” though; customer loyalty becomes
evident when choices are made and actions are taken by them. Customers may express high
satisfaction levels with a company in a survey, but satisfaction does not equal loyalty.
Loyalty is demonstrated by the actions of the customer; customers can be very satisfied and
still not be loyal.
Terms of customer loyalty or Relationship Marketing or Database Marketing or Permission
Marketing or Customer Relation Management (CRM), are all used for the goal of trying to
increase customer loyalty. Or in other words, getting customers to choose to buy or visit you
more. Increased customer loyalty is the end result and the desired goal of these programmes.
All of the above approaches have two elements in common: they increase both customer
retention and the lifetime value of customers. (Lifetime value = the total value a consumer
can bring to a company over his lifetime through purchases and recommendations).
Customer loyalty is the result of well-managed customer retention programmes; customers

who are targeted successfully by a retention programme demonstrate higher loyalty to a
business. All customer retention programmes rely on communicating with customers, giving
them encouragement to remain active and choosing to do business with your company.
Technology enabled customer data and models can tell you which customers are most likely
to respond and become loyal, no matter what kind of front-end marketing programme you are
running or how you “wrap it up” and present it to the customer. The data will tell you who to

promote to, and how to save precious marketing dollars in the process of creating customers
who are no longer loyal to you.
For example, let’s say you look at your most loyal customers and find that on an average they
buy or visit you at least once every 30 days. So you begin tracking these customers, and
discover 20% of them “skip” their 30-day activity. In addition, 90% of the 20% who skip
never come back. You are watching the erosion of customer loyalty right before your eyes.
It is commercial sense to develop a way to identify high loyalty customers who are at risk,
and take action before they leave you.
This is achieved by using the data customers create through their interactions with you to
build simple models or rules to follow. These models can be your early warning system, and
will alert you in time for you to do something before the customer defects. Behaviour models
cause the data to speak to you about the loyalty status of the customer before it’s too late.
Importance of Social Media in Creating and Maintaining Customer Loyalty
Loyalty evokes a strong sense of emotion in human beings and is one of the reasons for
successful relationships. Business relationships between brand and customer are no
different. When a consumer feels loyalty to a particular brand or product, they tend to stay
lifelong supporters and champions of the brand. They promote the product to their peers and
continue to look forward to and purchase newer models, editions, etc.
Since its evolution and subsequent adoption, social media has changed the way businesses
interact with their customer’s and audience. This new dynamic has created a unique
opportunity for businesses to connect and build brand loyalty with their customers. Because
of its simplicity combined with immediacy, social media is an ideal way to reach out to or
talk about a particular brand, product, or service. It has also paved the way for businesses to
create a two-way dialogue as they can now directly connect with their audience and
customers in a very personal and timely way.
Successful businesses have recognized the direct link between social media and building
brand loyalty. The two-way communication allows for the two seemingly separate entities to
connect and build relationships that scratch deeper than the surface. And because of the
volume of people that social media can reach, it increases the chances of developing and
cultivating new loyalties.

Three steps to build brand loyalty using social media
1. Build the relationship
2. Take advantage of online channels
3. Engage
Developing loyalty with today’s empowered consumer requires incentives beyond premium
pricing, service promises, and redeemable rewards. In today’s quest to become your
customers’ irreplaceable vendor, you have to develop a customer dependency driven through
customer knowledge, communication coordination, anticipation of needs, and ease of use.
Happy customers = loyal customers, and loyal customers = brand advocates. And we all
know how powerful brand advocates can be. Positive reviews from brand advocates can do
more for your brand than many marketing campaigns can, and the more they are rewarded for
their loyalty, the likelier they are to share their great experiences on your behalf.
THE ROLE OF CULTURE IN CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

There comes a point when money can no longer buy you success. It cannot buy you brand
equity or exceptional customer experiences or even successful utilization of your CRM
system. Money cannot buy you everything, no matter how much of it you have.
Let us take example of the airline industry. You board an airplane today in the United States,
and with very few exceptions, you are welcomed with a fake smile from an overtired, jaded,
and uncaring flight attendant. You sense right then and there that you are anything but
welcome, and the last thing on earth this flight attendant wants is to see you, let alone serve
you. There is no amount of money in the world that will make this flight attendant smile
sincerely toward you and welcome you wholeheartedly (the key words being sincerely and
wholeheartedly). That sincere smile cannot come from extrinsic incentives; it comes from
intrinsic motivation. She either wants you to be there or she does not.
The challenge of creating brand value, exceptional experiences, and lasting customer
relationships is dependent today more on the individual choice made by this flight attendant
(and others like her) than on any sophisticated CRM analytics tool or training program. Many
companies have already fixed broken processes, optimized their call centers, and developed
social media response teams. The new front line is your people's attitude. This is where
traditional management tools clash with the new reality. You cannot force, from the top
down, all your people to smile sincerely. This is their choice, which means we can no longer
use command and control tools such as processes, but ought to explore new tools. We ought
to develop cultural tools that make people want to smile sincerely and delight customers and
make them feel as if there is no other place the person who is serving them wants to be. When
managing the emotional aspects of the customer experience, companies are dependent on the
employee's choices far more than on a manager's ability to force a new procedure.
In a recent study conducted for a business-to-business national organisation, our assessment

of the emotional aspects of the customer experience was dismissed almost outright by the
executives. They felt that their clients were only looking for timely, affordable solutions,
nothing more. The reality is far from this assumption. The number one driver of customer
loyalty was emotional, and out of the top five loyalty drivers, three were emotional. Product
quality was number four in importance. What a misalignment! Where was the disconnect
originating? The executives say their business is selling widgets to rational businesses. They
forgot that businesses are made up of people with feelings and emotions and aspirations. It
does not matter if customers purchase Disney tickets or a widget, they still love, feel, hate,
get angry, need forgiveness, and hope for a better future. If you connect to this element of
them, you will create a memorable experience they will cherish far longer than they
remember your lower price.
Culture is often perceived by rational executives as too touchy-feely to consider. In reality,

culture is who you are. Culture drives your innovation, differentiation, and customer
connection. Create a culture of mistrust and your organisation will end up treating customers
as cheaters unless proven otherwise. Create a culture of generosity and your customers will
feel the love. (Would some customers abuse this? Maybe. If so, do something about those
who take advantage, but do not penalize all the honest customers and undermine your
differentiation in the process.)
Culture must appear on your corporate agenda. No different than your target for the year,
culture is your defining differentiator. It is the answer to the questions "How are we going to
make the numbers this year? What path will take us there? How are our people behaving and
delighting?”
Any organisation is the sum total of its people's choices to care or ignore, to be authentic or
detached. What choice would your organisation make?

Customer Retention
Customer retention is the philosophy and practice of treating customers so well that the
customer will lack any reason to go anywhere else.
The philosophy of building your business on the basis of repeat sales, past customers and
word-of-mouth recommendations sums up customer retention.
The rule of thumb of marketing is that it costs five to ten times more to acquire a new
customer than to retain an existing customer.
Customer retention marketing is a tactically driven approach based on customer behavior. In

the case of online businesses trying to improve customer retention, advertisers and retailers
must study how users actually use the Web, according to Booz-Allen & Hamilton, the elite
management and technology consulting firm, and NetRatings, Inc. Web usage patterns fall
into seven categories of online behavior, and while in some categories consumers are more
likely to buy, in others they are nearly immune to traditional online marketing pleas.
Customer retention is considered by both scholars and practitioners to be one of the critical
success factors for retail businesses with its implications for cost savings and profitability.
Furthermore, retained customers enhance profitability with their lower sensitivity to price
changes and their higher likelihood of referring new customers. Customer retention is an even
more challenging issue in the context of online shopping, where the switching costs for
customers are minimal. It is therefore important to identify the major determinants of online
customer retention.

State True or False.
1. Customer loyalty describes the tendency of a customer to prefer and choose one business or
product over another for a particular need.
2. Customer retention is said to be the philosophy and practice of treating customers so well
that they lack any reason to go anywhere else.
Security Trust and Collaboration
One of the major factors for any customer to become loyal to a e-retailer is the trust and
confidence on the website. The internet has challenges for a digital marketer in terms of
technology as well as the way we view the Internet as a tool of social and political
empowerment.

The challenges can be summarised as,
1. Data localization,
2. Increasing amount of regulation
3. Accountability
But, in the context, of the key elements that occupy (or should occupy) the attention of policy
makers, technologists and users, two are, trust and collaboration.
We are all aware that trust in the Internet has been seriously eroded. Over the past couple of
years, various event have slowly, but progressively, eradicated much of the blind trust we
previously held towards the Internet; nowadays, for instance, we are fully aware (if not, we
should be) that use of the Internet comes with a certain degree of privacy concessions.
This loss of trust in the Internet creates two main problems:
 It displaces the root of the problem.

 How do we restore that trust?
As some authors have observed, the issue of the lack of trust in the Internet has nothing to do
with the Internet itself, rather with the way governments, businesses and other actors abuse its
technology to spy, monitor, observe and map the behavioral patterns of users.
Some experts recognize trust as an important element in information technology. After the
global financial crisis, trust in the financial institutions, their mission, role and ability to
secure consumers’ future was completely lost. And, although we have now escaped the
probability of a global financial collapse, trust in these institutions still ranks significantly
low.
We should not let the same happen to the Internet. We need to understand that arrangements
of technical infrastructure are, in essence, arrangements of power; but, as it has been
accurately pointed out, we also need to be fully aware of the fact that different parts of the
Internet’s architecture, command different levels of governance – the technical, legal and,
moral triangle.
Which brings us to the second key element – collaboration.

Although most of the experts view this in the context of security, readers are reminded that
the genesis and evolution of the Internet is essentially an outcome of the collaborative efforts
of a variety of actors. The Internet benefits from the increasing amount of actors that want to
team up and work together.
Kathy Brown, President and CEO of the Internet Society of USA has emphasized the Internet
Society’s efforts towards a collaborative security framework, stating further that getting
communities – in their structured, expertise-based sense – on the table should be our key
priority.
Collaboration is the only way forward – especially in the current Internet reality. At the
end of the day, the best frameworks of regulation and technology come from the
collaborative efforts of businesses, the technical community, governments and users.
We are at a tipping point with our approach towards the Internet. But, as one of the experts
has rightly said, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Internet is not responsible for the
way it is used or abused by the various actors. Once we understand that we should be
skeptical to the way its potential can be abused, we should gather together and collaborate to
protect it.
DATA WAREHOUSING AND DATA MINING
CRM can be defined as a strategy that captures and uses organisational knowledge and
technology within the context of the organisational structure and culture in order to support
and enable proactive and profitable long-term relationships with customers based upon actual
customer preferences rather than upon arbitrary general assumptions. At the center of CRM
are the knowledge management, data warehouse (DW), data marts and data mining tools.
An intelligent and effective database management is the backbone of any effective CRM
initiative. It is just not possible to implement meaningful CRM without having data and data
management in place. Data by itself is meaningless; knowledge generated out of it, if used in
the proper context, becomes meaningful and helps organisation reap the benefit of CRM.
Concepts of Data Warehouse
Data Warehousing is a relational database concept, designed for query and analysis. It
contains integrated historical data derived from transaction data. It isolates the data analysis

from transaction processing. This helps in maintaining historical records, analyzing the data
to have better understanding of future prediction gathering of data and transforming it into
useful actionable information for delivering to business users is processed through extraction,
transportation, transformation and loading solutions.
In the world of computing the term data warehousing is an efficient system which is used for
reporting and analysis. These systems are used to store the historical as well as current data
which is used for making trending reports which is used further for senior management
reporting used for comparisons annually and quarterly. It helps in bringing all the data in a
central location called data warehouse.
All the data that is stored in this warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems. The
data in this warehouse is passed through various operations. The data warehouse environment
consists of various source systems that provide this warehouse with data.
Various data integration technologies are used to make the data ready to use. Various
architectures, tools and applications are included for storing data in this warehouse. A data
warehouse has its foundation on a mainframe server. The data here is extracted and organised
which serves the user queries. It gives us the advantage of gathering information and data
from diverse resources for easy access and analysis.
Three-Tier Data Warehouse Architecture
Architecture of data warehouse depends on requirement analysis of an industry. Three widely

used architectures are:
1. Data Warehouse Basics
2. Data Warehouse with staging area
3. Data Warehouse with staging areas and Data marts
Generally, the data warehouses adopt the three-tier architecture. Following are the three tiers
of data warehouse architecture.
1. Bottom Tier: The bottom tier of the architecture is the data warehouse database
server. It is the relational database system. We use the back end tools and utilities to feed data
into bottom tier. These back end tools and utilities perform the Extract, Clean, Load, and
refresh functions.

2. Middle Tier: In the middle tier, we have OLAP Server. The OLAP Server can be
implemented in either of the following ways.
a. By relational OLAP (ROLAP), which is an extended relational database

management system. The ROLAP maps the operations on multidimensional data to
standard relational operations.
b. By Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) model, which directly implements

multidimensional data and operations.
3. Top-Tier: This tier is the front-end client layer. This layer holds the query tools and
reporting tool, analysis tools and data mining tools.
Following diagram explains the Three-tier Architecture of Data warehouse:
Fig: Three-tier Architecture of Data Warehouse
Benefits of Data Warehousing
The are various benefits of Data warehousing, as follows:
i. Data Warehouse Delivers Enhanced Business Intelligence
ii. A Data Warehouse Saves Time
iii. A Data Warehouse Enhances Data Quality and Consistency

iv. A Data Warehouse Provides Historical Intelligence
v. A Data Warehouse helps by saving cost
Data Warehouse Appliance
A data warehouse appliance is a combination hardware and software product that is designed
specifically for analytical processing. An appliance allows the purchaser to deploy a high-
performance data warehouse right out of the box.
In a traditional data warehouse implementation, the database administrator (DBA) can spend
a significant amount of time tuning and putting structures around the data to get the database
to perform well for large sets of users. With a data warehouse appliance, however, it is the
vendor who is responsible for simplifying the physical database design layer and making sure
that the software is tuned for the hardware.
When a traditional data warehouse needs to be scaled out, the administrator needs to migrate
all the data to a larger, more robust server. When a data warehouse appliance needs to be
scaled out, the appliance can simply be expanded by purchasing additional pug-and-play
components.
A typical data warehouse appliance comes with its,
1. Own operating system,
2. Storage,
3. Database management system (DBMS)
4. Software.
It uses massively parallel processing (MPP) and distributes data across integrated disk
storage, allowing independent processors to query data in parallel with little contention and
redundant components to fail gracefully without harming the entire platform.
Data warehouse appliances use,
1. Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)
2. Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)

3. OLE DB interfaces
To integrate with other extract-transform-load (ETL) tools and business intelligence (BI) or
business analytic (BA) applications.
Currently, smaller data warehouse appliance vendors seem to be concentrating on adding

functionality, such as in-memory analytics, to their products in order to compete with the
mega-vendors. It is anticipated, however, that all appliance vendors will be impacted by the
trend toward inexpensive, high-performance, scalable virtualized data warehouse
implementations that use regular hardware and open source software.

1. Data warehouse is designed mainly for query processing.
2. Data Warehouse Delivers Enhanced Business Intelligence
Concepts of Data Mining
Most marketers understand the value of collecting customer data, but they also realize the
challenges of leveraging this knowledge to create an intelligent, proactive pathway back to
the customer. Data mining technology and techniques (for recognizing and tracking patterns
within data) helps businesses sift through layers of seemingly unrelated data for meaningful
relationships, where they can anticipate (rather than simply react to) customer needs.
Data mining is a process of automatically discovering information, data patterns,

relationships, tendencies. In other words it is “mining” knowledge from large data. Data
mining also provides the capabilities to predict the outcome of future observations based on
previous data.
Data Mining is used for transforming data into business information and thereby improving
decision making process. Data mining is the analysis of the data for the new relationships
between various types of data. It is basically done by sorting and analysing the data to
recognize the patterns and relationships between various types of data. Association of
patterns is done by relating one event to another. A sequence or path is setup after analysis of
patterns where one event is responsible for the occurrence of other. All the patterns are
classified and organisation of data is done accordingly. And discovering of new patterns

every time is used for predictive analysis. The data mining techniques are used in research
areas.
Data Mining gives results that show the interdependence and relations of data. Most of the
time, important decisions that are taken are based on the decision maker’s perception of data
rather than information that is based on the data in the data repository as they do not have any
powerful tool to extract and analyse data. Traditional data analysis tools and techniques fail
for such data because of its massive size and non-traditional nature. To solve this problem a
new method has been developed, which is Data Mining. Data mining technology blends the
traditional method of data analysis, which is suitable for processing of a large amount of data.
Data mining helps to identify customers most likely to perform a particular behavior such as
purchase an advancement or churn from the company, to predict whether customers will buy
new policies or not, based on previous data of a similar type of customers. Data mining must
be tightly integrated in the organisation with other systems.
Web Mining
It is becoming important in the field of customer relationship management. It is basically the

integration of data and information by data mining methodologies. The information is
gathered from all over the world. When used in customer relationship management it is used
to observe the customer behaviour and their needs more properly and surely this helps in
success of the market. The data mining parameters like classification association and
clustering are used for evaluation of the data.
Decision Support System
It is an application of data warehousing which is used in analysis of data related to business

and presents its results in such a way so as to make the business decisions easier for the
business users. It is considered to be an informational application. It basic purposes are to
compare the sales figures of various weeks. Assumptions are also done by forecasting the
revenue figures based on the sales of products. The past experiences and sales are also
counted and make the decisions right. The information presented by decision support system
is done graphically. It may also include an artificial intelligence system for the purpose.

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
Knowledge Discovery on databases is a process of converting raw data into meaningful

information called ‘knowledge’. This consists of a series of processes from data collection
through post-processing to deriving results.
Fig: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
• Selection: Retrieve data from various sources for data mining.
• Pre-processing: Involves data cleansing, removal of noisy and inconsistent data.
• Transformation: Convert to the common format or to a new format.
• Data Mining: Techniques are applied to extract a pattern to get the desired results.
• Interpretation/Evaluation: Visualisation or representation is used to present results

to the user in a meaningful manner.
Primary Task of Data Mining
The data mining task is generally divided into two categories:
1. Predictive Task: This type of task is to predict the value of one attribute based on the
values of other attributes. Attribute use to predict is known as the ‘explanatory’ or
‘independent’ variable and the attribute to be predicted is known as the ‘target’ variable.
2. Descriptive Task: This task is descriptive in nature and is used to generate a pattern
and find out the underlying relationship among different kinds of data. This task is self-
explanatory in nature.
Data Mining Methods
Data mining is considered an interdisciplinary field. It includes a set of various disciplines,

such as statistics, database systems, machine learning, visualisation and information science.

Owing to such diversity, classification of the data mining system helps users to understand
the system and match their requirements with such systems.
Data mining systems can be categorised according to various criteria, as follows:
Fig : Classification of Data Mining Systems
a. Classification according to types of databases mined: A database system can be

classified as a ‘type of data’ or ‘use of data’ model or ‘application of data’, for that matter.
b. Classification according to the types of knowledge mined: This is based on

functionalities such as characterisation, association, discrimination and correlation,
prediction, outlier analysis, etc.
c. Classification according to the type of techniques utilised: This technique involves the
degree of user interaction or the technique of data analysis involved. For example,
database-oriented or data-warehouse-oriented techniques, machine learning, statistics,
visualisation, pattern recognition, neural networks, etc.
d. Classification according to the applications adapted: This involves domain-specific

application. For example, the data mining systems can be tailored accordingly for
telecommunications, finance, DNA, stock markets, e-mail and so on.
Data Warehouse for CRM
Customer Relationship Management is a set of activities performed by a company or

organization (business and non-business) to manage and analyse information about their
customers, to keep in contact and communicate with their customers, to attract and win new

customers, to market products/services and conduct transactions with their customers and to
service and support their customers. For non-business organisations the word “customers”
can be substituted with “citizens”, “users”, “stake holders”, “applicants”, “visitors”,
“constituents”, “interested parties”, “students” or similar, as long as the term describes the
people that the organization serves.
A CRM system is a package of applications that supports the above activities. Among various
functionalities of a CRM system, below are functionalities that are ideally supported by a
data warehouse or utilising the data from a data warehouse. Other functionalities may best be
served by an Operational Data Store or front end applications
 Single customer view

 Permission management
 Campaign segmentation
 Manage deliverability
 Customer services/support
 Customer analysis
 Personalisation
 Customer loyalty scheme
Let’s discuss these functionalities one by one.
1. Single Customer View
One of the most important things in CRM data management is the concept of Single
Customer View. This concept was raised because customers could be defined differently
depending on the context and to which department we are talking to. For example, a customer
could be defined as follows:
 A customer is anybody who has purchased from us.

 A customer is anybody who has registered with us.
 A customer is anybody who has paid us.
 A customer is anybody who is currently subscribed to our newsletters.
And on top of that we have to deal with variations and complications such as:

 Order cancellations: what if the customer has ordered (purchased) from us but before
we deliver the goods he cancelled his order? Do we count him as a customer?
 Contract termination: what if a customer signed a contract for a particular service
from us for a year then the following year she did not renew the contract? Do we still
count her as a customer?
 Un-subscriptions: the customer has subscribed to our newsletter and then
unsubscribed from that newsletter. Do we count him as a customer?
 Order life cycle: order fulfilment process consists of many stages: quotation produced,
contract signed, account opened, order placed, order dispatched (for physical goods),
order fulfilled/delivered, consumed (for services), invoiced, paid, returned, credit note
raised, refunded, account closed. So, at what stage do we recognized them as a
customer? Different industries have different order stages.
 Even though it is not technically a customer yet (technically it may be a prospect),
some departments such as marketing need us to store the prospect data.
 When does a customer stop becoming a customer? When they no longer consume our
products or services? In some industries such as waste management, the process of
‘discharging’ a customer is done in stages, for example: stopping the collections,
removal of bins, settlement of accounts, deactivate customer status. In some industries
there is not concept of stop becoming a customer. Once they purchase something they
become customers forever.
So, practically speaking potentially we may need to store subscribers, registered users,
purchaser and prospects as customers. What we do in the data warehouse is to build the
customer dimension based on several different sources in the operational systems: order data,
subscription and permission data, registration data and marketing data. We can use overlay
technique, we will have many attributes on the customer dimensions and we need to duplicate
the data, for example based on customer name, date of birth and address, or email address.
Single customer view simply means that we need to build a customer dimension that is solid,
i.e. no duplication of data, complete (no missing customers) and correct. Deduplicate is not
always easy, for example name can change when women get married, address changes when
they move houses and email address changes over time too (a hard bounce could be an
indication). Hence we need to use other measures such as time frame or data age (e.g. we can
use the data if it is no more than 1 year old) or using other criteria such as Social Security

Number, date of birth, etc. MDM and CDI vendors have a lot experience in this area, as well
as data quality and data profiling software such as Trillium.
2. Permission Management
Regulations differ from country to country, but the basic principle is we can only send
campaign to customers who have already given us their permissions to send it to them. Based
on the scope, there are 2 kinds of permissions: subscription-based and general permission.
In a subscription-based scenario, we receive requests from customers for sending them a

particular communication. For example, say we have 3 communications: weekly newsletter,
low price alert and special offers. Customers can subscribe to these communications, either
only to 1 communication, 2 communications or all 3 communications. In this case, if the
customer subscribes to the low price alert, we can only send them low price alert, we cannot
send them other communications. If we have a new communication, we cannot send it to
subscribers of other communication. Instead, we need to build a new subscriber base for the
new communication. Subscriber base is created by getting end users to subscribe to particular
communication through website or promotions.
In the general permission type, customers do not subscribe to a particular communication.

Instead, they give permission for us to send them a particular type of communication. For
example, say we have 2 communication types: promotional items and subscription items. In
this case the subscription items cover everything that is regular and promotional covers
everything that is ad hoc. Another example: we can have 3 communication types:
transactional (such as order confirmation emails and e-tickets), marketing (such as
promotional campaign) and third party (such as campaign from our sister companies).
Permission is also categorized based on the communication channel or media, for example:
by email, by SMS/text, by post, by telephone and by RSS feed. There is also a permission for
sending (or not sending) any kinds of communication to customers. For example, a customer
could call or email us asking to be excluded from any forms of communications.
For a multinational company, the permission is could be per locale. It is not necessarily
country based, for example: Benelux, Nordic and Scandinavia are often mentioned as one
locale, even though they consist of several countries. In those cases 1 office serving more

than 1 country. It is possible that each locale has more than 1 language. We could also have
several brands or names. For example, we could be operating in a certain country using 3
different company names, each having their own monthly newsletter or promotional
campaign. Permissions can also have a validity period, e.g. only for 1 year. We need to take
locale, language, brand and validity period into account when constructing the permission
fact table and communication dimension.
So permission management is the capability of a CRM data warehouse to store the

permission, based on all of the attributes. And to always keep them up to date. The
permission data needs to be made available to the campaign management system to support
the campaign segmentation process. It is frequently used, i.e. every time the users create a
campaign.
3. Campaign Segmentation
When creating a campaign, we need to have a list of customers to whom we are going to send
it to. These end users are known as campaign target audience. Campaign segmentation
process produces this list. Most CRM software has this capability. This is where the SCV
play an important role. The richer the customer dimension, the more flexible we can create
the segmentation. Segmentation criteria that are commonly used are:
 Permission
 Demographics
 Order data
 Campaign delivery
 Campaign response
 Customer loyalty score
 Customer profitability
We will give an example on each of the above items so we are clear about what they are.
 Permission: all customers who subscribed to weekly newsletter in the last 3 months.
 Demographics: all female customers age 20 to 40 who live in Mumbai.
 Order data: top 1000 customers (by order value, excluding VAT) who have purchased
electronic products from us in the last 12 months.

 Campaign delivery: exclude customers who had more than 3 hard bounces more in
the last 8 weeks.
 Campaign response: include all customers who have opened the last campaign.
 Customer loyalty score: include customers from the top tier with more than 500
loyalty points.
 Customer profitability: include all customers from band A with annual order value >
INR 30,000.
4. Manage deliverability
Campaign Results
What we meant by campaign results are:
 Campaign delivery data, i.e. whether the campaign successfully reaches the target
audience. For example, say we have an email campaign with 100,000 target
recipients. Because of invalid email addresses, we only sent 99000 and did not send
1000. Out of these 99000 that went out, 96000 were delivered to the target recipients’
mail boxes and 5000 were bounced. All this information is called campaign delivery
data.
 Campaign response data, i.e. reactions from the customers receiving the campaign,
perhaps by clicking on a link if it is an email campaign, or calling customer service
center if it is a postal campaign.
 Orders resulting from the campaign, i.e. out of the customers who responded to the
campaign, how many actually placed their orders, what did they purchase and what
are their order values.
Let’s go through these 3 points one by one.
Once campaign segmentation is ready, CRM system executes a campaign and sends it to
target audience. Data about to which customers the campaign were successfully delivered and
to whom it was not delivered, along with the reason why it was not delivered, should be fed
back by the CRM system to the data warehouse. We are not only talking about email
campaign here, but also by post, by telephone, by text messages and by home page
customisation. This campaign delivery data (i.e. sent, not sent, bounced and delivered) will be

useful for future campaigns. One possible design for storing campaign delivery data in the
data warehouse is a fact less fact table, with customers, communication, date, channel,
delivery status and reason as the dimensional keys.
Specific to email campaigns, when the campaign reaches the target audience email box, end
user may open that campaign email and perhaps click on any particular offer in that
campaign. These open and click through events are fed back to underlying data warehouse.
No mechanism is 100% reliable, but one mechanism for logging open events is a transparent
1 pixel image inside the body of the email, with a query string containing a customer
identifier on the image tag. The web log of this image is then processed daily and the hit of
this image, along with the customer identifier and the timestamp, is stored in the campaign
response database. A mechanism for logging click-through events is redirection, i.e. the link
on the campaign email hits a landing page with the destination page URL and a customer
identifier in the query string. A script behind the landing page then records the time of the
event, the URL of requested page and the customer identifier into the campaign response
database before redirect the user to the real page. The campaign response database is then fed
back by the ETL to the data warehouse to be used for future campaign as additional criteria
when doing segmentation.
Open event could be stored on the same fact table as the campaign delivery data. Some of the
customers who responded to the campaign might place their orders. These orders are tracked
using promotional code if it is a postal campaign, or using a identifier on the offer link if it is
an email campaign, or using a standard software package such as Omniture Site Catalyst if
the order is placed online. Data that are normally fed back into the data warehouse to be used
in future campaign are who the customer is, which campaign it is resulting from, and the
usual order attributes such as product type, quantity and values. This way it would enable us
to analyse campaign effectiveness, analyse customer behaviour and to monitor how much of
the company revenue is generated from CRM activities, which could be used for ROI
calculations or backing the proposal for future projects.
5. Customer Support
Customer support is one of the important aspects of CRM industry. Many companies use
various CRM tools to build customer support systems. Support system helps to solve

customer queries, provide them promotional updates etc. For e.g. Customer call centre to
update billing address or phone number etc.
Many companies use ODS (Operational Data Store, back office integrated operational
database in 3rd normal form) to store latest customer’s data to provide quick and efficient
search capability to fetch up customer’s information. The underlying ODS database can be
populated from OLTP (online transaction processing system) databases or from data
warehouse (in rare cases) for latest customer information. Many CRM vendors provide tools
and techniques to transfer data between ODS and data warehouse. ODS can be populated
from data warehouse/ Data Marts for customer specific data which is not persisted in OLTP
databases.
6. Customer Analysis
Various types of customer analysis could be performed in the data warehouse. To give you
some ideas, below are some examples.
 Purchase pattern analysis, i.e. what kind of products or services does a particular
group of customers purchase. The groupings could be based on demographics or
campaign results. Based on the patterns we could try to forecast future purchases and
relate it with inventory management, in particular the reorder level and purchasing
lead time.
 Price sensitivity analysis, i.e. identifying changes in shopping and purchasing
behaviour if the price changes. In this case we also group the customers for analysis,
not individual customers. We try to identify if there are certain patterns which would
be useful for setting future marketing strategies and operational directives.
 Shopping behaviour (especially for online businesses), i.e. identifying the factors
associated with site traffic to measure the effectiveness of site design, checkout
process design and help increase conversion rates. Shopping behaviour analysis is
also conducted to gather the customer interests (which pages on the online store the
individuals are more interested with), to be included as a factor when doing
Personalisation exercise such as site Personalisation and personalised offers.
 Customer attrition analysis, or customer churn analysis, i.e. to answer the
questions such as how many customers defected from us each week or month, how
many new customers we are getting each week or month, what kind of customers we

are losing (in terms of profitability and demographics) and what kind of new
customers we are gaining (in terms of product or service range and demographics).
Also included in this kind of analysis is changes in the type of service or product that
the customer is having (this does not apply for supermarket but it is applicable for
health care and financial services, for example the type of account).
 Customer profitability analysis, i.e. revenue that we receive from the customer
minus the costs associated to that customer, over a certain period (say weekly or
annually). We want to know which customers we are losing money from, and which
customers are making money from. The formula to calculate the revenue side is
normally not difficult but allocating the cost to each customer activity is technically
and politically not easy.
 Fraud detection, i.e. large increase in credit card purchases which deviate
significantly from the individual or group normal pattern (for financial service
industry); unusual returns of goods by the same customer (identified by name, post
code and customer card number) within short period of time, compared with the daily
and seasonal behaviour of the product line of suspected product code (this one is for
retail industry); spiky account balances and unusual withdrawals/deposits (for banks),
drops in recent invoice values not accompanied with lower usage activity (for telecom
industry). Another method is to use 2 (or more) groups of samples, one containing the
fraudulent transactions and the other representing good transactions. These groups are
then fed into the mining model for training.
Each type of analysis requires different data model, and different industry requires different
data model. For example, customer profitability fact table in utility sector (electricity in
particular) could be an incremental snapshot type, containing monthly snapshot of all
accounts monthly revenues (calculated based on service types, rates and usage) and
proportionate cost structure for the same period of time. The revenue may be per kwh but the
base cost may be by weight (tons of coal) which makes the equation non-linear hence for
some customers we could be making a loss and for others we are making handsome profit.
Although dimensional model can do a lot of analysis, in some cases we have to use
multidimensional models, i.e. cubes. Many types of customer analysis especially those that
involve predictive analytics, behaviour recognition, statistical analysis, non-linear estimation,

cluster analysis and patterns finding, would require data mining running on multidimensional
database.
7. Personalisation
What we meant by personalization is tailoring our web site, products, services, campaigns
and offers for a particular customer or a group of customers. There are large categories of
personalisation:
1) We ask the customer what their preferences are, or
2) We guess their preferences based on their shopping behaviour, purchase history and
demographic attributes.
Once we know (or we think we know) the customer preferences, we offer them our products
and services which we think would suit their preferences.
Examples of personalisation are:
 Price and product alerts, i.e. we let the customer know if what they like appears in our
data warehouse. Price alerts are notification to the customers when there are special offers
(lower price) on certain products or services that satisfy their criteria, for example if they
would like to fly to certain cities or purchase certain type of digital camera. Product alerts
are notification to the customers when a certain product appears in our database. For
example: they declare their favorite singer or musical preferences, then we notify the
customers when a certain album or single that suit those preferences appear in our
database. The basic working principle is matching: on the one hand we have many
suppliers supplying us with thousands of products and services every day and on the other
hand we have a lot of customers with certain preferences. All we have to do is to match
them automatically.
 Personalised offers, i.e. we offer our customers certain products or services that we think
match their needs or profile. There are 2 broad categories on how to choose the products
or services: a) based on their past purchases (or shopping/browsing if it is an online store),
and b) based on the customer attributes. Example of past purchases: because a customer
purchased ink jet printer 3 months ago, they may need color ink cartridge today. Example
of customer demographic attributes: the customer had a 3 months old baby so she may

need baby products. For online stores and online services, customers could be identified
by using cookie or asking them to login and once identified we could track their shopping
behaviour, i.e. which product or service category they are spending a lot of time on, etc.
 Recommendations, which is basically the same as personalised offer. But this term is
normally used when the customer is still shopping on the web site (for online businesses),
unlike the term ‘offers’ that normally used when they are not shopping, i.e. via email or
post. Recommendation tends to be targeted to one customer, whereas personalised offers
can be targeted to a group of customers that satisfies certain criteria, for example, those in
certain age range or live in certain cities.
 Site Personalisation (specific to online businesses), i.e. the web site contains different
products and services (and prices) depending on who the customer is. There are 2 methods
which are widely used to identify the customer: login and cookie. Login is the most (if not
the only) certain way of identifying who the customer is, i.e. by supplying credentials,
such as user ID and password. Serving the same purpose as login are: bio metric ID (such
as finger print), challenge response device (such as a device that displays different
response numbers every time it is activated, based on certain seed number which has been
planted into the device) and security token (such as security card). Using cookie is
probably 50-60% at best, never achieve 80% certainty. Some people disabled cookies on
their browser, some installed certain plug-in on their browser which prevents cookies,
some people regularly cleaned their temporary Internet files including cookies and of
course some people don’t use their own, permanent computer, i.e. Internet café, a friend’s
house, a shared home computer, an office or campus computer, library’s PC, etc.
The content of site personalisation may be generated by a CRM system (as an XML), by
setting up a campaign that is executed once a day. The logic behind this campaign does a data
mining on a multidimensional data warehouse or, if we prefer a simpler way, by running a
rule-based logic stored as metadata against the dimensional data warehouse. These rules are
conditional rules, e.g. similar to IF … THEN … statement but with a lot of IFs. Price and
product alert do not need a dimensional data warehouse. They can run on a 3rd normal form
ODS. Or even on the front end CRM system.
One of the logic behind personalised offer (and recommendation) is ‘what similar people are
interested in’. ‘Similar people’ can be quite a challenging term to implement. Some of the
most popular classification techniques are nearest neighbour, neural networks and

classification trees. Nearest neighbour is classification of customers based on their position in
multidimensional space. Imagine that each dimensional attribute or each distinguishing factor
that contributes to the grouping is a vector or arrow. The direction of the arrow is determined
by the value of the attributes. A customer is defined by joining all the arrows by putting the
beginning of the next arrow at the end of the previous arrow. This way a customer consists of
all their dimensional attributes. Customers that are close to each other are classified as
“similar”. Close or far is defined as multidimensional distance, i.e. square root of sums of all
components’ squares. The difficult thing to do here is assigning numeric values to the
dimensional attributes. As we all know dimensional attributes are mostly non-numeric. If the
dimension has a hierarchy (such as city or location) then the numeric score depends on
whether they have the same parent or grand-parent.
Classification trees method is using a diagram where a branch has 2 sub branches. At each
branch whether we go to sub branch 1 or sub branch 2 depends on the value of the attributes
which is compared to certain criteria (normally a constant). Starting at the trunk, after
following all the branches and sub branches we will arrive at the leaves. Now if we bring say
1 million customers to through these paths, some of them will end up at leaf 1, some at leaf 2,
some at leaf 3, etc. The leaves are what we call classes. A customer is said to be “similar” if
they are in the same class, or a nearby class, which is defined by the number of levels.
 Customer Insight
Customer information is not useful without its intelligent analysis. Analysis is always
evolving and finding new ways to increase revenues through customer insight. Customer data
plays vital role to build customer insight. Customer insight is a model to view available
customer data and to analyse customer behaviour over period of time.
Using a data warehouse one can create rich customer dimension and use it to create customer
insight. Business analyst can analyze complete customer data set in following ways:
 Customer shopping Analysis:

Using historic order data, customer-shopping behaviour is analysed. For example,
business analyst can find answers to all the following questions by doing customer
data analysis:
o How many times customer has purchased from us?

o What is time gap between two consecutive purchases?
o What is the purchase pattern?
o What product has he purchased most?
By answering above questions business user can understand customer-shopping behaviour

and can design future marketing strategy to retain that customer.
8. Customer Loyalty Scheme
Customer loyalty scheme is the way to reward high valued customers and build loyalty
among customer bases. Many enterprises use customer scoring/point based system to build
loyalty-based program. Customers are scored based on their previous shopping behaviour and
points are calculated accordingly. Customer scores can be stored in customer dimension.
CRM system uses these customer scores to design campaigns and group customers as per
their loyalty points. Different customers are offered different promotions as per their scores.
Some popular software used in Data Warehousing:
1. Talend Data Warehouse Tools for Data Integration and ETL
Talend's flagship product is Talend Open Studio for Data Integration, a powerful, easy-to-use
data integration and ETL tool that's been downloaded millions of times since it was first
launched as open source in 2006 and has hundreds of thousands of active users. With an
Eclipse-based graphical development environment, more than 400 built-in data connectors, a
unified meta-data repository, automated generation of Java code, and robust ETL testing
functionality, Talend Open Studio for Data Integration dramatically boosts developer
productivity and reduces time-to-value for ETL data warehouse projects.
While Talend Open Studio for Data Integration is free to download and use under a GPLv2
open source license, Talend also offers the subscription-based Talend Data Integration.
Talend Data Integration includes all the data warehouse tools of Talend Open Studio for Data
Integration, plus additional enterprise class functionality such as an embedded business rules
engine, change data capture, deep drill-down visibility into source and target data systems,
impact analysis mechanisms, and project auditing tools.

2. Talend Data Warehouse Tools for Data Quality Management and MDM
Talend Open Studio for Data Integration and Talend Data Integration are feature-rich data
warehouse tools that support the design, development, and deployment of data extraction,
data conversion, and data loading operations, as well as related integration processes like data
replication and data synchronization. Talend also offers complementary data warehouse tools
packages that specifically address issues of data quality and master data management, both of
which can be seamlessly integrated with Talend Data Integration.
Talend Data Quality makes it easy to enhance the quality of your data before loading it into
your data warehouse, with support for normalization, de-duplication, and enrichment by
reference to internal or third party. Talend Enterprise MDM is the first open source product to
provide comprehensive support for master data management and enterprise data governance.
3. IBM Netezza
The IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance offers simple deployment, out-of-the-box
optimization, no tuning and minimal on-going maintenance.
4. Oracle Exadata
Offer a fast, reliable, and cost-effective platform for data warehousing and business
intelligence that is easy to scale to meet the complex reporting.
5. MS SQL Parallel Data Warehouse
Parallel Data Warehouse offers scalability to hundreds of terabytes and high performance
through a massively parallel processing architecture.
6. Apache Pig
Apache Pig is a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level
language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for
evaluating these programs. The salient property of Pig programs is that their structure is
amenable to substantial parallelization, which in turns enables them to handle very large
data sets.
Data Mining for CRM
The secret to an effective CRM package is not just in what data is collected but in the

organising and interpretation of that data. Computers can’t, of course, transform the
relationship you have with your customer. That does take a cross-department, top to bottom,
corporate desire to build better relationships. This is where Data Mining, Artificial
Intelligence, and intelligent search applications come in.
A good CRM application will provide the facility for the business to store and manage data
they collect on their customers, and products. A better CRM will have the ability to group the
data, convert them to information and display them in its search results whenever a user types
in a word that may match the group of keywords associated to the question.
Data mining, a branch of computer science is the process of extracting patterns from large
data sets by combining methods from statistics and artificial intelligence with database
management. Data mining is seen as an increasingly important tool by modern business to
transform data into business intelligence giving an informational advantage. The related
terms data dredging, data fishing and data snooping refer to the use of data mining techniques
to sample portions of the larger population data set that are (or may be) too small for reliable
statistical inferences to be made about the validity of any patterns discovered. These
techniques can, however, be used in the creation of new hypotheses to test against the larger
data populations.
The manual extraction of patterns from data has occurred for centuries. Early methods of
identifying patterns in data include Bayes’ theorem (1700s) and regression analysis (1800s).
The proliferation, ubiquity and increasing power of computer technology has increased data
collection, storage and manipulations. As data sets have grown in size and complexity, direct
hands-on data analysis has increasingly been augmented with indirect, automatic data
processing. This has been aided by other discoveries in computer science, such as neural
networks, clustering, genetic algorithms (1950s), decision trees (1960s) and support vector
machines (1980s). Data mining is the process of applying these methods to data with the
intention of uncovering hidden patterns. It has been used for many years by businesses,
scientists and governments to sift through volumes of data such as airline passenger trip
records, census data and supermarket scanner data to produce market research reports.
A primary reason for using data mining is to assist in the analysis of collections of
observations of behaviour. Such data are vulnerable to co-linearity because of unknown
interrelations. An unavoidable fact of data mining is that the (sub-) set(s) of data being
analysed may not be representative of the whole domain, and therefore may not contain

examples of certain critical relationships and behaviors that exist across other parts of the
domain. Data mining commonly involves four classes of tasks:
 Clustering – is the task of discovering groups and structures in the data that are in
some way or another “similar”, without using known structures in the data.
 Classification – is the task of generalizing known structure to apply to new data. For
example, an email program might attempt to classify an email as legitimate or spam.
Common algorithms include decision tree learning, nearest neighbor, naive Bayesian
classification, neural networks and support vector machines.
 Regression – Attempts to find a function which models the data with the least error.
 Association rule learning – Searches for relationships between variables. For

example a supermarket might gather data on customer purchasing habits. Using
association rule learning, the supermarket can determine which products are
frequently bought together and use this information for marketing purposes. This is
sometimes referred to as market basket analysis.
With technology growing in leaps and bounds, Data mining has been considered to be added
into customer relationship management applications. Rather than randomly contacting a
prospect or customer through a call center or sending mail, a company can concentrate its
efforts on prospects that are predicted to have a high likelihood of responding to an offer.
More sophisticated methods may be used to optimise resources across campaigns so that one
may predict which channel and which offer an individual is most likely to respond to across
all potential offers. Additionally, applications could be used to automate the mailing. Once
the results from data mining (potential prospect/customer and channel/offer) are determined,
this applications can be programmed either automatically to send an e-mail or regular mail or
with the few steps a user has to click a button and mails to customers can be sent in bulk. Of
course, the issues of bulk mail and spamming should be given due consideration here, it
would be at the onus of the business to ensure their mass mailing is not construed as spam.
Finally, in cases where many people will take an action without an offer, uplift modeling can
be used to determine which people will have the greatest increase in responding if given an
offer. Data clustering can also be used to automatically discover the segments or groups
within a customer data set.
Businesses employing data mining may see a return on investment, but also they recognise

that the number of predictive models can quickly become very large. Rather than one model
to predict how many customers will churn, a business could build a separate model for each
region and customer type. Then instead of sending an offer to all people, who are likely to
appear on the search, it may only want to send offers to customers. And finally, it may also
want to determine which customers are going to be profitable over a window of time and only
send the offers to those that are likely to be profitable. In order to maintain this quantity of
models, they need to manage model versions and move to automated data mining.
An example of a CRM application would be in a car manufacturing business (assuming they

sell directly to end users). If they maintained a database of which customers buy what type of
product, and when, how often they make that purchase, what type of options they choose with
their typical purchase, their color preferences, whether the purchase needed financing etc., the
manufacturer knows what marketing material to send out, what new products to promote to
each customer, what preferences/options may swing the sale, whether a finance package
should be included in the marketing material and when would be a good time to target each
customer. They could use the information to build a relationship with the customer by
reminding customers of service dates, product recalls, and maybe even to send the customer a
birthday card.
A good place to start would be to make a list of your objectives and the benefits your
organisation hopes to achieve. When looking at CRM solutions you want to check the
features and functionality “out of the box”
– Customisation is all very nice but it takes time and may not be as easy as you think
– supported platforms in terms of hardware, operating systems, databases, online activities

and online ordering systems etc., (not just your back office systems but third-party software
you use too)
– Integration with those systems
– Global perspective
– Price – preferably a one-off purchase price with no annual license fee.
Therefore, if you are looking to grow your business in leaps and bounds, and you know the
way to it is to grow your customer base, to improve your relationship with your customer, to
actually be able to get insights on your customer buying behavior and pattern, then you need
a CRM application.

Some Open Source Data Mining Tools:
 RapidMiner (formerly known as YALE)
Written in the Java Programming language, this tool offers advanced analytics through
template-based frameworks. Offered as a service, rather than a piece of local software, this
tool holds top position on the list of data mining tools.
In addition to data mining, RapidMiner also provides functionality like data preprocessing
and visualization, predictive analytics and statistical modeling, evaluation, and deployment.
What makes it even more powerful is that it provides learning schemes, models and
algorithms from WEKA and R scripts.
RapidMiner is distributed under the AGPL open source license and can be downloaded from
Source Forge where it is rated the number one business analytics software.
 WEKA
The original non-Java version of WEKA primarily was developed for analyzing data from the
agricultural domain. With the Java-based version, the tool is very sophisticated and used in
many different applications including visualization and algorithms for data analysis and
predictive modeling. Its free under the GNU General Public License, which is a big plus
compared to RapidMiner, because users can customize it however they please.
WEKA supports several standard data mining tasks, including data preprocessing, clustering,
classification, regression, visualization and feature selection.
WEKA would be more powerful with the addition of sequence modeling, which currently is
not included.
 R-Programming
Besides data mining it provides statistical and graphical techniques, including linear and
nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering,
and others.
 Orange
Python as a programming language has become very popularity because it’s simple and easy
to learn yet powerful. Orange is a Python-based, powerful and open source tool. Special
features of this tool are visual programming and Python scripting. It also has components for
machine learning, add-ons for bioinformatics and text mining. It has built in features for data

analytics.
 KNIME
Data preprocessing has three main components: extraction, transformation and loading.
KNIME does all three. It gives you a graphical user interface to allow for the assembly of
nodes for data processing. It is an open source data analytics, reporting and integration
platform. KNIME also integrates various components for machine learning and data mining
through its modular data pipelining concept and has caught the eye of business intelligence
and financial data analysis.
Digital Communities
A digital community is interacting across the boundaries with people through any media. It is
a social network of individuals. It provides interaction, friendship, information and
acceptance between individuals.
Digital communities are used by social or professional groups for interaction. They have
become one of the important ways to reach the customer in a more efficient and effective
way.
For a digital marketer the communities has evolved in a powerful route to create and maintain
customer connect and loyalty. Presence on communities like Facebook has become a must
have for all the marketers.
In this unit we would try and understand the concept of community and the strategies and
challenges associated with building presence in communities.
COMMUNITY CONCEPT
Community is defined as, “Network of customers that interact with a company and each
other.”
One of the major uses of Web is to build a number of customers for exchanging product
related or service related information. It also helps to build a good relationship between the
customers and an organization. These networks and relationships are called communities.
In this way, an environment can be developed where it’s difficult for the customers to leave
the family of other people who also purchase from the same company. The customers can
exchange tips and other information with each other and in the process they become more
bonded to the company and the brand.

Companies can also potentially post on the website about the experiences of the customers
with the product to promote their services. It will actually contribute value to the community.
This also helps to build good network with the customers.

An online community is a group of individuals with some common interest who connect and
interrelate with each other over time. The emergence of the information age found groups
communicating electronically rather than face to face. A computer facilitated community uses
social software to regulate the activities of the participants. These are places where people
gather to share knowledge and tap opportunities. The participation in online communities and
forums started as a medium for exchange of ideas and information, and now organizations
have started using these communities for marketing through consumer evangelism (advanced
form of word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) in which companies develop customers who
believe so strongly in a particular product or service that they freely try to convince others to
buy and use it.) and support.
BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS THROUGH COMMUNITY

The customers should be given the impression that they are a part of the organization and that
they own the section of the site of the company where they can share the information and
their experience. By this, a company creates a more personal relationship with the customers.
Web based communities can enhance the repeated purchases of the brand.
For example, Procter and Gamble’s Crest brand has a website that invites families to
participate in games and obtain information. Taken together, these relationship programmes
help to implement the concept of personalization in the introduction. Web based customer
service, loyalty programmes, customized products and services, and communities all bring a
sense of an individual relationship between company and customer which was difficult and
costly to implement before the commercialization of the internet.
Communities or social network are all over the Internet. It is great that customers and
prospects interact about the brand and related issues. Community is a new media that
differentiates it from the traditional media.
“The rise of virtual communities in online networks has set in motion an unprecedented shift
from vendors of goods and services to the customers who buy them. Vendors who understand
this transfer of power and choose to capitalize on it by organizing virtual communities will be
richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns.” -
John Hagel
The key to successful community is customer-centred communications. Community helps in
customer to customer, customer to company, and business to business interaction. It also
helps to create a global exchange shop by acting as intermediaries enabling users to exchange
views.
Types of Digital Communities
The digital communities can be classified on the basis of following,
1. On the basis of traffic
2. On the basis of purpose
3. On the basis of access / membership
On the Basis of Traffic

With respect to traffic, communities can be classified as below:
1. Empty communities: A community without any people.
2. Silent communities: A community may have many registered members, but there are
no conversation flags among community members.
3. Critical communities: Many communities on the manufacturer or retailer sites can
be critical of the brand.
On the Basis of Purpose
On the basis of purpose communities can be classified as below:
1. Leisure: Some people spend their leisure time in online communities. People come
together, talk about games, sports, TV, music and have fun doing it.
2. Relationships: The world is a lonely place, it’s hard to approach a strangers. You might
try to find fellow sportsperson or expand your business network.
3. Fix Something: Something isn’t right in the world and you want to fix it. Maybe the
environment is going to hell, or the computer operating system is not as good as it needs
to be.
4. Self-Improvement: You want to improve your life. Perhaps be better at your job or
expand your reputation? Maybe it’s to save time or seek help.
On the Basis of Access / Membership
On the basis of access or membership communities can be classified as below:

1. Blogs
2. Public social network
3. Owned public social network
4. Private online communities
5. Hybrid online communities

1. A community without people is not a community.
1. Customers want to share their ideas and want to talk to each other, to participate and to
create and to hear what other customers want to say.
Online Social Network

Social networking has changed over the years. Given below is a small description of some
popular social media networks, which are mostly used by individuals or groups these days.
BLOGS
Definition of Blog
“A blog is a website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary,
descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are usually
exhibited in reverse chronological order.”
A blog is a voice on the web. It’s a place to share, to inform, to complain, to enquire and to
exchange views. Many people use a blog just to organize their thoughts, while others
command influential, worldwide audiences of thousands. It is also useful for publishing
news. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs.
Blogs give an easy method of regularly publishing web pages which are best described as
online journals, diaries or news or events listings. Frequency can be hourly, daily, weekly or
less frequently but daily updates are typical.
Popular Social Media Networks
Facebook
Facebook is an online social networking service. Users have to register before using the site,
after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages,
and receive automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may
join common-interest user groups organised by workplace, school or college, or other

characteristics, and categorise their friends into lists, such as “People from Work” or “Close
Friends”.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. LinkedIn

strengthens and extends your existing network of trusted contacts. LinkedIn is the largest
professional networking site available today. LinkedIn provides a way to connect with other
professionals and helps you stay in contact with millions of users using a professional
platform to keep in touch. LinkedIn is strictly used for exchanging knowledge, ideas, and
opportunities and has increasingly become a leader in helping individuals find groups of
interest as well as jobs in their field.
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send
and read “tweets”, which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Registered users can
read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through
the website interface, SMS or mobile device app.
Google+
Google+ (sometimes written as Google Plus is a social networking and identity service that is
owned and operated by Google Inc.) Google has described Google+ as a “social layer” that
enhances many of its online properties, and that it is not simply a social networking website,
but also an authorship tool that associates web content directly with its owner/author.
YouTube
YouTube, owned by Google, is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share and
comment on and view videos. YouTube is the largest video-sharing site in the world and
YouTube search is the second-largest search engine in the world.
Some principles of managing digital communities

1. Community must have a purpose
2. Community should be part of the overall business strategy and execution
3. Use right technology tools for data analytics
4. Resource allocation for the purpose
5. Establish dialogue, do not use community as a broadcast medium
6. Know the members of the community

7. Share control of community with members
8. Create a buzz and encourage advocacy
Digital Marketers guide for different communities –
Community type Strategy Public / Goals

private
Blogs Marketing Public Grow awareness and reach
Public social network Marketing Public Grow awareness and build
relationship
Owned public social Marketing Public Generate sales leads and
network reduce operations cost
Private online Product sales private Increase sales and retention
communities
Hybrid online Product / Public Improve lead generation,
communities Marketing sales and retention

1. MP3 blog is used for sketches.
2. Photo blog is for music.
E-CRM through Effective Customer Complaints Handling A consumer complaint or

customer complaint is “an expression of dissatisfaction on a consumer’s behalf to a
responsible party” (Landon, 1980). It can also be described in a positive sense as a report
from a consumer providing documentation about a problem with a product or service. In fact,
some modern business consultants urge businesses to view customer complaints as a gift.
Consumer complaints are usually informal complaints directly addressed to a company or

public service provider, and most consumers manage to resolve problems with products and
services in this way, but it sometimes requires persistence.

If the grievance is not addressed in a way that satisfies the consumer, the consumer
sometimes registers the complaint with a third party such as the Consumer forum (in India) or
Federal Trade Commission (in the United States). These and similar organizations in other
countries accept for consumer complaints and assist people with customer service issues, as
do government representatives like attorneys general. Consumers however rarely file
complaints in the more formal legal sense, which consists of a formal legal process.
In some countries (for example Australia, the United Kingdom, and many countries of the
European Community), the making of consumer complaints, particularly regarding the sale of
financial services, is governed by statute (law). The statutory authority may require
companies to reply to complaints within set time limits, publish written procedures for
handling customer dissatisfaction, and provide information about arbitration schemes.
Internet forums and the advent of social media have provided consumers with a new way to
submit complaints. Consumer news and advocacy websites often accept and publish
complaints. Publishing complaints on highly visible websites increases the likelihood that the
general public will become aware of the consumer's complaint. If, for example, a person with
many “followers” or “friends” publishes a complaint on social media, it may go “viral.”
Internet forums in general and on complaint websites have made it possible for individual
consumers to hold large corporations accountable in a public forum.
REASONS FOR CUSTOMERS COMPLAIN
As the Internet becomes an increasing part of our lives there are a growing number of
websites which are run for dissatisfied customers to publicly air their complaints about bad
service.
How can you prevent your business from becoming ‘feature of the week'? Of all the skills
small business owners need these days, the one least practiced is the ability to step back and
look at your business from the customer's perspective.
It's more effective to know what your customers could potentially complaint about and put it
right before it happens.
So what are the common reasons for customer complaints?
Generally a financial loss is the obvious reason for customer complaint.

Broadly the reasons for customer complaint can be categorised in to the following areas.
1. Operational reasons
2. Behavioural reasons
Let us look at these categories.
I. OPERATIONAL REASONS
1. What was promised was not delivered.
2. Product didn't deliver what was promised.
3. You're never open when I need you.
4. Phone at call centre not answered promptly
5. Calls to call centre transferred to another person midway to call or call disconnected
II. BEHAVIOURAL REASONS
1. Bad Attitude
2. Not willing to provide a Solution
3. Not Giving Full Product information
4. Not Willing To Accept Mistake
5. Not keeping customer with up To Date information
6. Broken Promises
Why people do not complain:
1. Majority of dissatisfied customers do not complain because they think that it is not
worth the time and efforts.
2. Many do not complain because they believe, it will not change anything.
3. At times customers do not complain because they do not know how to do it.
4. Some of them do not complain because they sincerely believe that it was their fault
that things went wrong.

5. Some of them do not complain simply because they are not interested and that there
are many other suppliers of the product and service and tomorrow if they need it they
can easily get it from the others.
WHY COMPLAINTS MATTER
Complaints matter because they are the definite indicators of how much your organisation
considers itself accountable to your customers.
Complaints are important due to following factors.
1. It creates improved Customer Satisfaction Index.

2. It improves customer retention and loyalty.
3. Avoids unfavourable or negative publicity.
4. Getting more customers through word of mouth through satisfied clients.
5. Saves time and efforts.
6. Avoids legal complications and costs.
7. It is an important input to management - for better understanding of Customer needs.
8. It saves money for the organisation.
9. Increased reputation for organisation.
10. They can give future direction and valuable insights.
As mentioned above complaints can be a great source of learning for an organisation. Digital
marketing is all about a dialogue with the customer. Complain is, although not so pleasant, an
avenue for dialogue with the customer. The fact remains that a well addressed complaint can
not only develop a dialogue with the customer but also build a long term relationship with
him.
For an organisation an effective addressing of complaint is a must. It as an opportunity of

opening doors to customer intelligence.
For organisations it is definitely worth it to explore a possibility of a dialogue with the

customers.
COMPLAINTS AND THE ART OF CUSTOMER CARE
Long back we have argued and agreed that CRM is about Customer Care and not mere
customer service. Customer Service takes a very limited view of the customer management

process. It is a way of administering your way through, trying to handle customer complaints
while Customer care is a professional way of looking at it as an opportunity of bettering the
transaction and series of them to develop a long term relationship.
Some of the important aspect of complaints and the art of customer care are:
1. Begin at the top.

2. Put customer in control.
3. Take responsibility.
4. Do not point fingers.
5. Hire the right people.
6. Adopt an integrated approach.
Begin at the Top:

Example: A CEO of a toys manufacturing company is particular about the continuously
learning through customer complaints and emphasises its important time and again in every
forum. Actually, she goes ahead and talks to unsatisfied customers, involves her in getting
complaints looked after and monitoring them periodically. Sure enough this organisation will
build a long term advantage of a quality product. And the route to this quality leadership is
through effective complaints handling which is spearheaded by the top.
The example given above is self-explanatory to highlight the importance of complaint

handling to begin at the top.
Put Customer in Control:

Let the customer take charge of the process of handling the compliant. On satisfactorily
registering the complaint customer can be given choice to resolve it within the time frame he
expects and the manner in which he intends it to happen.
It is ridiculous to then say that ‘it is against our company policy’.
A noted guru on Change Management Sumantra Ghoshal said “Successful professional is the
one who breaks rules selectively”. It is thus when you want to keep your customer’s interest
live you should selectively take a route other than prescribed by the policy or procedures.
In order to give Customer true control of the situation one needs to have trust on customers
and believe that he / she will not take advantage of the situation.

Take Responsibility:
Always begin with a patient listening of a customer complaint. Let him vent out the
frustration caused due to your product or service problems.
Secondly, never argue or take stands. Understand that it is company’s fault (if it is) and it is
the company’s responsibility to fix it.
Example: You are an online retailer’s courier company. You promise to deliver packages
anywhere in the world within 72 hours. You do deliver the packet in time but at the wrong
destination. It is not the customers’ fault although he will have to go through rigmarole of
fighting with you to get the packet delivered to the right destination again.
Do not Point Fingers:
In the example above about the courier company it is no point in pointing to the airlines or
your office abroad that may be at the fault. Customer is in no way concerned with the airlines
or with your office abroad. He has dealt with you, given you the packet and expects you to
deliver.
Hire the Right People:

It is essential that your people have the very basic skill of listening in order to take up the job
at customer complaint handling desk. The right people for such a job are the one with ample
of patience and an empathetic attitude. It is not that everyone can wear this cap. It comes with
its thorny feathers. He is the person who believes in solving people problems and to derive
great satisfaction out of it.
Adopt an Integrated Approach:

Let Customer support be an integral part of CRM exercise and not a standalone activity.
Integrate this with the entire gamut of CRM offering. It should not just remain a necessary
evil in the organisation but an equally responsible like the Marketing or Sales function. After
all this is one of your customer facing department and its persona is as important as may be
marketing communications department.
A CRM approach to customer complaints handling strategy:

Fig 5.1: Complaint Handling Strategy Process
1. People do not complain because they believe, it will not change anything.
Fill in the blanks.
1. It is the journey from ____________ to satisfaction.
2. ________ believes in a dialogue with the customer.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANGEMENT
Customer experience management (CEM) is the collection of processes a company uses to

track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization
throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal of CEM is to optimize interactions from the
customer's perspective and, as a result, foster customer loyalty.
Customer experiences include interactions through traditional channels, such as purchases,

customer service requests and call centre communications and also, increasingly, through
social CRM channels such as Twitter and Facebook. To manage the customer experience,

companies need to create a strategy that encompasses all customer touch points across the
organization.
The essence of CEM is treating customers as individuals. He quotes Stanley Marcus, former
president and chairman of the board at Neiman-Marcus: "Consumers are statistics. Customers
are people."
A good definition of CEM comes from Colin Shaw & John Ivens in their book “Building
great customer experiences”
“The customer experience is a blend of a company’s physical performance and the emotions
evoked, intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contacts”.
In order to understand this definition, let us look at the words underlined.
It is a blend, not one thing or another but blended together. It is about the physical and very
importantly the emotional. It is measured intuitively by customers against their expectations.
Finally it is not just when you are in a shop; it is whenever you come into contact with that
organisation or its brand across all of their moments of contact. It goes into the vital details
that tell you the truth about an organisation.
Customer today is an evolved person – better informed, well connected and empowered than
before. Also, today there are many new competitors in the same category and different
categories at times compete with each other.
In a digital environment the customer experience management tells us how physical and
emotional gets blended to create this experience.
Mainly the Content (emotional) and also the Presentation (physical) makes the complete
appeal and creates an experience for a customer.
COMMITMENT OF TOP MANAGEMENT AND THE TEAM
CEM appreciates the fact that with every interaction regardless of channel or nature of
interaction, the customer learns something about the company.
A customer will only repurchase product or service from you because of good previous
experience. Customers generally like to revisit the store or website those treat them as
individuals; not as a number or a code.
Decision to implement CEM in your organisation will depend mainly on two factors:

 Is your top management committed to it?
 Is your organisation ‘people-ready’ to take up CEM challenges?
A good Trekker will tell you how life gets difficult as you climb higher on the mountain.
Same applies to organisation- life gets tougher as you go up the ladder. But then like a
trekker-in business also, you have a wider (and perhaps better) view when you are at the top.
This better vision should also get you a better picture of changing customer need and
expectations. An experience, we have already said revolves around customer expectation.
Top management has to be convinced and then commit to CEM.
Only top management’s commitment will not be sufficient but you need to check if your
organisation is ‘people ready’ to take up CEM as a culture.
CEM is not an individual’s or an individual department’s job. It is a group activity, a

continued responsibility.
KEEPING CUSTOMER’S EMOTIONAL NEEDS AT THE CORE

In order to optimize effectively the customers’ digital experiences, one must analyze the
feedback, run reports, and make well informed decisions based on the comprehensions and
insights.
Speculation and Assumptions in today’s globally digital era are no longer adequate for digital
marketing.
One need to consolidate and integrate digital visitor and customer analytics, content
management and automated testing and targeting. This needs a fresh technological
perspective which considers content management, analytics, and targeting as holistic
competences and the building blocks of a platform.
In perfect harmony with this step change in the technology available to today’s digital
marketer, offer specialized consulting services, ranging from requirements gathering and
validation to the development and implementation of a digital marketing strategy tailored to
meet your explicit objectives.
Focusing on strategy around a 360-degree view of the customer by asking questions such as

 “Where are we at?”
 “What do we want to achieve?”, and
 “What do we want to learn about our customer?”
Products do satisfy physiological and emotional needs and services take care of both too.
Importance of Customer Experience Management
Customer experience has become a critical differentiator in today’s hyper-competitive, hyper-

connected global marketplace. There’s tangible business value in managing the customer
experience effectively.
Some of the importance factors of customer experience management are,
1. Help is brand preference through better experience
2. Increased revenue from existing and new customers
3. Customer loyalty
4. Lower cost due to reduced customer churn
Challenges to a Digital Marker in Creating a Better Customer Experience Management
1. Creating consistent brand experience across different channels
2. Integrating channel and brand experience
3. Technology and legacy processes
4. Consolidating data in to a single view of customer
Steps of a Good Experience Management Process
1. Create and maintain complete customer profile
2. Personalize all customer interactions
3. Get right information to right place and right time.
1. To deliver a good customer experience, organisations must know customer better than ever
before. That means creating and maintaining complete customer profiles that help you
understand and measure your customers' journeys at every touch point across multiple

channels. The more you know your customers, the more effective you’ll be at delivering
relevant offers to them. The more relevant your offers are, the closer the relationship between
your business and your customer becomes – driving metrics like loyalty and retention.
Historically companies have used structured data – e.g., demographic, transactional and log
data – to construct customer profiles. Today, you must include emerging types of data –
social media, video, RFID, sensor, geolocation, etc. – tied together with cross-channel
coordination. And add contact, response and transactional history interspersed throughout the
customer life cycle, as well as customer value, profitability, behavioral analysis and
propensity scores.
2. A thorough understanding of the customer, you can use that knowledge to personalize
every interaction. Remember to not only focus on the customer, but also on the context in
which the customer operates. Your data can help you maintain that focus, particularly if you
continue to enrich existing (core) data with new sources. By adding context to your customer
focus, you can deliver relevant, insightful offers, recommendations, and advice and service
actions when a customer is most receptive.
A virtual world customer has more presence, power and choice than ever before. If they are
not provide a personal, relevant, timely and insightful message, you will alienate them
immediately.
3. To deliver the most value at each customer touch point – and improve the customer
experience – you need to map analytics to specific stages in the customer life cycle so you
can deliver the right message to the right place at the right time. Each life cycle stage is
important – from initial consideration, to active evaluation, to the moment of purchase and
even to the post-purchase experience. Each stage is an opportunity to improve the customer
experience. And each stage is an opportunity to gain more insight that you can feed back into
your marketing processes to draw from the next time.
Fill in the blanks.
1. Customers generally like to revisit the website those treat them as ______; not as a number
or a code.

1. In order to create a right kind of CEM it is important to understand the difference between
the _____ and functional aspects of Customer care.
1. Products do satisfy physiological and emotional needs and services take care of both.
Summary
 Word-of-mouth marketing is still as relevant as ever in the digital age.

 e-CRM provides organisation a means to conduct interactive personalised and
relevant communication with customers across both electronic and traditional
channels.
 Using Internet strategies to identify the customer is one of the best ways for
maintaining and satisfying customers.
 For all companies doing business on the Web, the implication is clear, you cannot
generate superior long-term profits unless you achieve clear customer type
identification.
 Operational CRM means supporting the front-office business processes which include
all customer contact (sales, marketing and service).
 Collaborative CRM provides a point of interaction between customers, staff and

business parameters, through new and traditional technologies.
 Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of data mining and other techniques to
produce useful results for decision-making.
 Offline business models and online business models can complement each other to
provide better corporate success.
 An e-marketplace is an Internet based facility that enables trade between one or more
purchasing organisations and a variety of suppliers.
 Customer loyalty describes the tendency of a customer to prefer and choose one
business or product over another for a particular need.
 Customer retention is said to be the philosophy and practice of treating customers so
well that they lack any reason to go anywhere else.
 Online marketing has limitation that can be classified as technical and non-technical.

 The elements that should occupy the attention of policy makers, technologists and
users are, trust and collaboration.
 A Data warehouse is designed mainly for query processing; hence it is different from
traditional online processing databases working methodology.
 The characterization of data warehouse makes it easier to understand the data
characteristics in data warehouse. Architecture of data warehouse depends on
requirement analysis of an industry. Three widely used architectures are: Data
Warehouse Basics, Data Warehouse with staging area and Data Warehouse with
staging areas and Data marts
 A data warehouse appliance is a combination hardware and software product that is
designed specifically for analytical processing. An appliance allows the purchaser to
deploy a high-performance data warehouse right out of the box
 Data mining is a process of automatically discovering information, data patterns,

relationships, tendencies or “mining” knowledge from large data. Data mining also
provides capabilities to predict the outcome of future observation based on previous
data.
 A primary reason for using data mining is to assist in the analysis of collections of
observations of behaviour.
 A Digital community interacts across the boundaries with people through any media.
It is a social network of individuals. It provides interaction, friendship, information
and acceptance among individuals.
 Digital communities are used by social or professional groups for interaction. Virtual
community can be one of the important ways to reach the customer in a more efficient
and effective manner.
 The key to successful community is customer-centered communications.
 A blog is a website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of
commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
Entries are usually exhibited in reverse chronological order.
 Customer complaints is the beginning of understanding customers and moreover
using this opportunity as developing a long term relationship with the customer.
 As studied in the unit it is important to establish a better complaints handling

mechanism in your organisation.

 However it is important to understand the psychology of complaints and why
complaints matter.
 The unit identifies the meaning of customer experience management.

 Top management and team involvement is essential for any customer experience
management to be successful.
 A good customer experience management leads to better customer loyalty and
revenue to the customer.
 The challenges for a digital marketer are in managing the technology to deliver better
experience to the customer actress multiple channels.
Keywords
 e-CRM: e-CRM can be defined as activities to manage customer relationships by using

the internet, web browsers or other electronic ways.
 Customer Loyalty: Customer loyalty describes the tendency of a customer to prefer and
choose one business or product over another for a particular need.
 Customer Retention: Customer retention is said to be the philosophy and practice of

treating customers so well that they lack any reason to go anywhere else.
 Segmentation: The process of dividing (partitioning) a market into distinct subsets of

consumers with common needs, goals, characteristics, with the goal of selecting one or
more segments to target with a distinct marketing mix is known as Segmentation.
 STP: Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning (STP) is the logical strategic outcome of
following a market segmentation strategy.
 Targeting - marketer selects one or more segments to target. To accomplish this he must
decide on a specific marketing mix – that is specific product, price, channel (place) and
promotional appeal for each distinct segment.
 Positioning - positioning the product in the consumers mind, so that it is perceived by the
customer as satisfying his needs better than other competitive offerings.
 "Consumer preference" means a consumer likes one thing over another.

 Demography refers to the vital and measurable statistics of the population and help to
locate a target market.
 Demography: Demography refers to the vital and measurable statistics of the population
and help to locate a target market.
 Data Warehouse: In computing, a data warehouse (DW, DWH) or an enterprise data
warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis.
 Data mining: Data mining is the analysis of the data for the new relationships between
various types of data.
 Decision Support System: It is an application of data warehousing which is used in

analysis of data related to business and presents its results in such a way so as to make
the business decisions easier for the business users.
 Data Warehouse Appliance: A data warehouse appliance is a combination hardware

and software product that is designed specifically for analytical processing.
 ETL: Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) refers to a process in database usage and
especially in data warehousing that: Extracts data from outside sources, Transforms it to
fit operational needs, which can include quality levels and Loads it into the end target.
 Architecture: It is both the process and the product of planning, designing, and
constructing buildings and other physical structures.
 Knowledge Discovery: Knowledge Discovery on databases is a process of converting
raw data into meaningful information called ‘knowledge’. This consists of a series of
processes from data collection through post-processing to deriving results.
 Community: Community is defined as, “Network of customers that interact with a
company and each other.”
 Online Community: An online community is a group of individuals with some common
interest who connect and interrelate with each other over time.
 Empty communities: A community without any people.
 Silent communities: A community may have many registered members, but there are no
conversation flags among community members.

 Critical communities: Many communities on the manufacturer or retailer sites can be
critical of the brand.
 Blog: A blog is a website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of
commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
 Social Media: Social media is the method of interaction among people in which they
share and exchange information and ideas in various communities and networks.
 Consumer: Consumer is the individual or organisational unit that actually uses a

product.
 CRM: The establishment, development, maintenance and optimisation of long-term

mutually valuable relationships between customer and organisation.
 Formal Study: You employ an internal committee or an external consultancy firm to

institute a formal customer perception study.
 Customer Lifetime Value: The total business generated by a customer over his / her
purchasing lifetime.
 Customer Experience: The customer experience is a blend of a company’s physical

performance and the emotions evoked, intuitively measured against customer
expectations across all moments of contacts.
Self-Assessment Questions
1. Elucidate the role of operational CRM and collaborative CRM with suitable
examples.
2. Explain the function of analytical CRM. Illustrate the relevance of analytical CRM
with suitable examples.
3. List down the methods of conducting online research to identify customers.
4. Study the cyber laws applicable in India.
5. Check the e-procurement program being followed by Tata Motors and find out how it
has improved its overall profits.
6. What is data warehouse architecture?

7. Describe the three-tier data warehouse architecture in detail.
8. Define data mining.
9. Describe data mining architecture.
10. Define data mining functionalities.
11. Describe steps for knowledge discovery.
12. Discuss the major issues in data mining.
13. Define community. Describe the concept of building partnerships through

community.
14. What are difficulties faced by a community? Also explain ways out from community
problems.
15. Define user-generated content. List out the pros and cons of user-generated content.
16. What is the use of user-generated content?
17. Define blogs. What are the different types of blogs?
18. Describe the significance of blogs especially for marketers.
19. Why are complaints so important for today’s organisations?
20. How can CRM strategies be used in complaint handling management?
21. Discuss the steps in effective customer complaint management.
22. Discuss the relationship of customer complaints, customer care and CRM.
23. Write a note on Emotional Intelligence.
24. Analyse the difference between CRM and CEM.
25. Why is organisation’s integration necessary in CEM?
26. Why customer’s emotional needs are at the core of CEM?
Answers to Check your Progress

Fill in the blanks
1. Habit is repetitive behaviour resulting as an absence of Information seeking, and

Evaluation of alternative choices.

2. Demographic trends can reveal opportunities such as shifts in age, gender and income
distribution.

Fill in the blanks.
1. Upselling implies selling something that is more profitable but also simply exposing the
customer to other options he or she may not have considered previously.
2. Data mining is the process of extracting new knowledge, previously undetected, selected
from databases for actionable decisions.

1. Trust of the customer on the organisation and its products and services is one of the important
parameters for retention.
1. True
2. True
1. True
2. True

1. False
2. False

1. True
Fill in the blanks.
1. It is the journey from satisfaction to satisfaction.
2. CRM believes in a dialogue with the customer.

Fill in the blanks.
1. Customers generally like to revisit the website those treat them as individuals; not as a
number or a code.
1. In order to create a right kind of CEM it is important to understand the difference between
the technical and functional aspects of Customer care.

1. True

Annexure 1
Some popular data warehousing tools –
Microsoft SQL Server

SSAS
SSIS
PowerPivot
Oracle Oracle 11g
OBIEE11g
ODI
Hyperion
IBM Data Stage
Infosphere
Cognos
Netezza
Informatica PowerCentre
IDE
IDQ
SAP BusinessObjects
Netweaver BI
Business Warehouse
Ab Initio Ab Initio
Teradata Teradata

Annexure 2
PRACTICLE EXERCISE
After taking up the course in e CRM the student is required to prepare a Facebook business
page and collect data on the visits to the page and analyze the same. The data is to be
collected from at least 50 respondents. The data such collected should be analyzed through
web analytics. The student will prepare the report based on this project work.
Tracking URL and Facebook insight would provide performance metrics for the page.
1. Create a Facebook business page - Steps to create a Facebook business page
Step 1: choose a classification
To begin, navigate to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. This page will

showcase six different classifications to choose from:
1. Local Business or Place

2. Company, Organization, or Institution
3. Brand or Product
4. Artist, Band, or Public Figure
5. Entertainment
6. Cause or Community
Each of these classifications provides more relevant fields for your desired Page.
For this practical, we'll select the second option: company, organization, or institution. After
selecting our desired classification, we'll be asked for an official name for our Business Page.
Facebook allows you to change your name and URL once, it's a difficult and tedious process.

Step 2: Complete Basic Information
Facebook should automatically walk you through the following four basic sections to
complete the fundamental aspects of your Page.
Complete “About Section - The "about" section will serve as the main 2-3 sentence
description for your company. It will be on your main page, so make it descriptive but
succinct. Be sure to include a link to your company website as well. Also ensure that this
information differentiates your brand, making your page even more appealing to potential
followers.
This is also where you can select your unique domain (that, as mentioned above, can only be
changed once
Upload profile picture - Next you'll be asked to upload a picture. This will serve as the main
visual icon of your page, appearing in search results and alongside any comments you
publish. While any perfectly square image will work, the recommended size is 180 x 180
pixels.
Add to Favourites
Every individual Facebook user has a vertical navigation bar to the left of their News Feed.
You can add your Business Page as a "Favorite" item here -- similar to bookmarking a web
page in your web browser -- for easy access.
Reach More People
Facebook will prompt you to create an advertisement to draw attention to your Page. Whether
employing paid tactics is a part of your strategy or not, I recommend avoiding starting any
ads at this stage -- there's no compelling content on the Page yet that would convince them to
ultimately "Like" your page.
Step 3: Understand the Admin Panel
The basic skeleton of your Business Page is now live. Facebook will ask if you'd like to
"Like" your Page. Again, I recommend avoid doing so at the moment. This activity will
appear in News Feeds of those you're connected to personally to on Facebook. Without any

content on the Page, we want to save that organic Timeline story for when you're really ready
for people to view the Page.
In the top navigation, you'll see an option for "Settings." Click that. Along the left side, a
vertical navigation bar with different sections should appear. We'll focus on three core ones
now:
 Page Info: This is where you can add additional details about your business. This section
will also unveil different fields based on the classification you chose in Step 1.
 Notifications: This section allows you to customize when and how you'd like to receive
Page alerts. Set a frequency that fits your social media marketing schedule.
 Page Roles: Whether or not you'll be the main manager of the Page, there may be others
at your organization who need access to your Facebook Page. Here, you can invite other
colleagues to make changes to your Pages. Some common use cases here include:
o A public relations manager who needs to respond to any delicate questions.
o A support representative who can assist those asking technical questions.
o A designer tasked with uploading new photo creative to the Page.
Step 4: Populate page with content
Now it's time to actually publish content to your Page and then invite users to be a part of
your growing community. Let's start with the basic content needed to get your Page kicking.
Post
The rest of your Page will populate over time as you publish more updates. Facebook
currently provides six different posting options:
1. Plain text status

2. Photo with caption
3. Link with caption
4. Video with caption
5. Event page
6. Location check-in

When posting on your page, just be sure to use a variety of content. What images would your
audience like to see? What stats would they like to read? What links would they like to click?
You can also click the little grey arrow in the top-right corner of each post and then click "Pin
to Top" to move one of your posts to the top of your Page's Timeline for seven days. Use this
feature for product announcements, business anniversaries, and other major events pertinent
to your brand.
Cover Photo
This is the large, horizontal image that spans the top of your Facebook Page. Typically, this is
a branded image to help attract people to your Page. The official photo dimensions are 851 x
315 pixels.
Now that there's content on the Page, we can start strategically inviting users to like it. It is
recommend to invite users in the following sequence,
First, invite colleagues to like your page and its content to build some initial activity.
Second, invite supporters in your network. Encourage them to engage.
Third, invite customers. With some activity now on the Page, they’ll be more interested.
With content published and users invited, you can go to the "Activity" tab in your Page's top
navigation to monitor how people are engaging with your Page and content.
Step 5: Measure Your Growth
Finally, we need to measure our efforts to ensure we're making valuable marketing decisions
on Facebook. Fortunately, Facebook has embedded in some decently helpful metrics for us to
take advantage of. Simply click the "Insights" option in the top navigation to see the
following:
 Overview: This tab shows a 7-day snapshot of your metrics such as Page Likes, post
reach, and overall engagement.
 Likes: This tab shows your overall fan growth and losses. If you're employing paid
efforts, you'll be able to see the breakdown of paid versus organic growth.

 Reach: This tab highlights the raw number of people your Page is reaching every day.
If you notice spikes on a specific day, try cross-checking what you posted that day to
see if you can replicate that reach.
 Visits: This tab indicates where on Facebook your viewers are coming from. You can
see the difference in visits on Facebook Timelines, your information tab, reviews, and
others.
Steps with Screen shots
Parts:
1. Setting Up Your Facebook Page

2. Making Your Page Shine
A Facebook fan page is a place where the fans of your business can share their passions and
learn more about changes and upcoming events in your business, whether you're running a
bar or a pet grooming service. Creating a Facebook page for your business will help you
reach more customers, have a better sense of what potential customers want, and will allow
you to stay current. Creating a page only takes a few minutes -- the hard part is keeping it
updated. If you want to know how to do it, just follow these steps.
Part I –
Setting up your Facebook Page

1. Click on "Create a Page." You can find this option on the bottom right of the sign-in
page on Facebook. If you're already logged in to your Facebook account, then you can just
click on the gear on the top right of the screen and then select the "create a page" option.
2. Choose "Local Business or Place." This option can be found on the top left of the screen.
3. Type in the relevant information about your business. Once you select this
option, you'll have to write the name of the business, the address, and the phone
number of your business. Then click on "Get Started."

4. Review the Facebook Terms of Service before agreeing to them. You can click
on "Facebook Pages Terms" in blue after you've typed in the relevant information.
Once you've checked those out, just click on the box that says you agree and move on.
5. Provide a description of your business. You'll be brought to the "About" section,

where you can write a short description of your company and also add a unique email
address for your business. Save the information when you're done by clicking "Save
changes."

6. Choose a profile picture for your business. Upload a photo of your business in
this step so that your Facebook page is more visually appealing. Click "Save changes"
when you're done.
7. Add your page to your favorites. If you're serious to monitoring your business'
Facebook page closely, then you should add this page to your favorites. Just click
"Add to favorites" to do this. You can select "Skip" if you choose not to do this.

8. Decide whether you'd like to advertise on Facebook. Advertising on Facebook
can bring more awareness to your business and can help you increase revenue. But
this comes at a cost, so you may not want to do this. If you're ready to pay for
advertising, click on "Add Payment Method" and follow the prompts. After this step,
your page will be ready!
Part 2
Making Your Page Shine
1. Build an audience. Select the "Build an audience" option on the top right of your
screen, which will allow you to invite your friends, your email contacts, and to share
your page with your friends. You can also post information about your business in
your Timeline to attract more fans.

2. Post status updates. This will give your fans more information about your
business. Try to post updates at least a few times a week if there are new things to tell
your fans. Do it too often and your fans can get annoyed; don't do it enough and they
can forget all about you.
3. Upload more photos of your business. Upload a cover photo and more photos of
your business to get your fans more excited about what you have to offer.
o To upload a cover photo, just click on "Add a cover" on the right hand side of
where your cover page should be, at the top of your screen, and select "Upload
Photo."

4. Maintain your page. Once you've set up your page and have started to add fans for
your business, you can make an effort to keep your page current by posting a few
times a week, uploading new photos, and continuing to invite new people you meet to
the page of your business.
o If you've changed the interior of your business or are selling a new product, post a
photo of it.
o If there's a sale or a special at your business, post about it.
o If your business received a favorable review, share it with your fans.
Some top Digital Marketing Companies in India
1. StudioHigh
StudioHigh is an awarding digital marketing company in India. It’s headquartered in
Mumbai and has branches in different other cities. They have worked with several
leading brands such as Audi, Mercedes, and ICICI etc.
2. Ignitee
Ignitee is an award winning digital marketing agency that leaves no stone unturned
when it comes to building a company’s brand online. It has received awards for the
best social media campaign of the year for Gangs of Wasseypur, from WAT agency.
They have experience in working for different sectors like entertainment,
automobiles, FMCG etc.
3. BCWEBWISE
BC web wise was established in 2004 by Chaaya Baradhwaaj. Even since its
inception, this company has had over 400 clients from different industries like
entertainment, telecom, media, finance etc. One of the most popular launches of BC
web wise so far was sun silk gang of girls.

4. MagnonTBWA
MagnonTBWA is one of the largest digital agencies in India. It is a part of the tbwa
group, which has over 300 offices in more than 90 countries. They offer full range of
digital marketing services, ranging from creative designing to software development
to social media management. They have handled cases from renowned companies like
Suzuki motorcycling, Haier, and Hyundai.
5. ShootOrder | Digital Marketing Agency

ShootOrder is one of the best digital marketing companies in India. The company
specialises in handling PPC Campaigns, Search Engine Optimization, Content
Marketing, Creative Advertising & Social Media Marketing.
6. PostBoxCommunications
This Mumbai Company offers end to end digital solutions to the companies and helps
them stay ahead of the competition. They befriend every brand they work with and
boosts their visibility online. They are a wholesome agency and their services range
from digital marketing to print ads to brand launch.
7. Agency09
Agency09 boasts of a young, motivated team that leaves no stone unturned in delivery
success. They have worked with several contemporary brands such as hoglicious,
sweet buds, Mihir Kothari photography, vinegar, home systems etc. Their range of
services include social media marketing, SEO, Facebook apps and many more,
helping the brands go viral online.
8. SocioSquare Digitech Pvt. Ltd.

Sociosquare is a part of a leading US based social media company and has their
Indian counterpart headquartered in Mumbai. They offer innovative social media
optimization services that fetch maximum ROI for any brand that chooses to work
with this company.
9. Social Wavelength
Social wavelength was formed by experienced ecommerce professionals Sanjay and
Hareesh. Together with their third co-founder, Mihir, who has a technical
background, realised the potential of social technology and formulated client focused
solutions that will help one achieve their targeted business goals.
10. Orion Digital

Orion social media offer 360 degree web marketing solutions to different businesses
across different sectors, namely entertainment, healthcare, finance, education and
many more. With the backup of a competent team, this company has been able to
execute successful social media campaigns by blending technicality with strategic
content marketing.
11. Pinstorm
Pinstorm focuses on integrated digital marketing and provides services like Search
marketing, Social Media marketing, Search engine marketing, campaigns, bids, ads,
prospects. Some Clients: Café Coffee Day, ICICI Bank, Sharekhan, HSBC, ET Now,
GQ, Open, NIIT, Jet Airways, Idea, Hindusthan Times, Taj, Sony, Tanishq, Lee,
Greenpeace, Yahoo, Canon, etc.

12. Techshu
This social media marketing company has a team of over 60 members including
skilled leaders and Google Certified Team individuals who take care of all the aspects
of Digital Marketing for the companies that are targeting the US, UK, Australia,
Canada, New Zealand market or the entire globe. PPC, SEO, SMO, affiliate
marketing, and conversion optimization are some of its significant services.
Some Clients: Hewlett – Packard, Aditya Birla Nuvo LTD, ABP (Ananda Bazar
Patrika Group), Nasscom, Turtle, mJunction (JV of TATA Steel & SAIL), SREI,
Rupa (Macroman), Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP West Bengal), Greenply Industries
Ltd, SRMB Steel, GKB Opticals.
13. Reprise Media

Reprise Media is a digital advertising agency focused on connecting brands with
customers that seek them out online. The services offered include paid search
marketing, social media marketing, and SEO. Some Clients: Verizon, American
Airlines, Hyundai, Honda, Cathay Pacific, Raymour & Flanigan, Sharp, United States
Postal Service, Metro PCS, Sharp, and more.
14. Ogilvy PR
Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide has a strong presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
It provides services like, consumer marketing, public affairs, media relations, product
marketing, and media relations. Client list: American Express, NIDDK, XEROX,
DuPont, BP, Ford, LG Electronics as well as local companies in 85 offices around the
world.
15. iStrat
iStrat is a member of National Association of Software and Services Companies
(NASSCOM) that deals with brand management and marketing. The company has a
wide range of services including digital communications services, search engine
optimization, social media, ecommerce services, web solutions, online marketing,
relationship marketing, interactive kiosks and digital films. Some Clients: Maruti
Suzuki, Nestle, Alpha Corp, Pepsico, Redtape, DSCL, Max India Limited, Ericsson
India, Pfizer India, Apesma India, CII, Hero Honda, Ranbaxy, Google, MSN, Yahoo,
Ask, Moneycontrol.com, NDTV, Wikipedia, and more.
16. K Web Maker

This is a full service digital marketing agency offering ecommerce, websites, portals,
and online marketing services. Some Clients: Mumbai Indians, APM Terminal,
Vedanta Foundation, Kingfisher training academy, Mahindra, Hyper city, Tata, Fortis,
and many more.
17. Webchutney
Webchutney works with leading companies in India by developing award winning
and memorable experiences for brands to connect, engage with and build sustained
relationships with their consumers online. Services include website design, online
advertising, social media, and mobile marketing. Some Clients: Airtel, Microsoft,
Unilever, Marico, Titan, MasterCard, Barclays, Proctor & Gamble, Budweiser,
Wipro, HDFC among others.

18. JWT
This company has six offices in major cities all over India. The digital media services
offered by the company have been awarded many times at Cannes India festival. Part of
WPP group of companies, it provides a wide range of communication services worldwide.
Based in New York the company has 200 offices in more than 90 countries. Some
Clients: Goodnight, Teach for India, Listerine, and many others. Location: India
19. McCann Erickson India

This is an award winning global advertising agency, which operates over 180 offices in
more than 120 countries. Digital marketing, relationship management, experiential
marketing, professional communications, global productions, media management, design
and consulting are some of the services offered here. Some Clients: Coca Cola, Master
card, Greenlam laminates, and many more.
20. Lowe Lintas

This is a leading and reliable digital services company headquartered in Mumbai. This is
wholly owned subsidiary of Inter Public Group or IPG in New York and the London
based Lowe+ Partners Worldwide Network. It has separate advertising, design, and
activation, brand consulting, health care marketing, and PR and film production
divisions. Some Clients: Tata Tea, ICICI Prudential, Idea, and many more.
21. Dentsu India

Tokyo based advertising company, has several wholly owned subsidiaries in India
including Dentsu Communications, Dentsu Media, Dentsu Creative Impact, and Dentsu
Marcom. The company specializes in media optimization and reality based couponing
and gaming platform. Offers a wide range of services including strategy, SEO, Social
media, search, web design and development, display, CRM, Analytics, and brand loyalty.
22. Contract
Contract Advertising prides itself on building and nurturing some of the longest lasting
relationships with the biggest pioneering brands in Indian Advertising. Today it has
offerings across mainstream Advertising, Digital, Business (Core) Consulting, and
Corporate Identity as well as Retail Design. A part of the WPP Group, Contract has cross-
functional specialists across its divisions. Some Clients: Asian Paints, Domino’s Pizza,
Religare, Tata Indicom, Spicejet, American Tourister and Samsonite, and many more.
23. Havas worldwide India

This consumers with its innovative and breakthrough solutions. Advertising, marketing
services, and relationship is a leading digital agency that enables maximizing relationship
between brands and management, and digital and interactive media services are provided.
Some Clients: Nokia, Dettol, Harpic, Sony Six, and many others.
24. MSL Group

This global group with over 100 offices worldwide specializes in campaigns, narratives,
customer engagement, and brand building. With a presence over 22 countries, the group
also provides services related to reputation management and corporate communication.
Clients: Ebay, Bonjour India, Reebok, Star plus India, Coca Cola, and more.

Website References –
1. https://www.google.co.in/search?q=google&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-
8&gws_rd=cr&ei=BrfnVqGcD4epuwS_yI3YAQ#q=how+to+create+a+facebook+pa
ge
2. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5492/How-to-Create-a-Facebook-
Business-Page-in-5-Simple-Steps-With-Video.aspx
3. http://www.pcworld.com/article/240258/how_to_make_a_facebook_page_for_your_s
mall_business.html?
4. http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Facebook-Page-for-a-Business
5. http://www.ecommercetimes.com
6. https://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2339815/building-and-maintaining-customer-
loyalty-with-today-s-consumer
7. Forbes, Entrepreneurs, Sep 3, 2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/09/03/ why-knowing-your-audience-
is-the-key-to-success/
Suggested Reading
1. Brian Stanford-Smith (ed.) and Paul T. Kidd (ed.). 2000. E-business: Key Issues,
Applications and Technologies. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
2. Grefen, Paul. 2004. Mastering e-Business. New York: Routledge.
3. Chase, Peter R. A Success Model for CRM Integration.
4. Gray, Paul. Customer Relationship Management.
5. Murphy, Erica. Why CRM Just Keeps on Ticking.
6. PeopleSoft White Paper Series
7. Oracle Data Warehouse Documentation-http://docs.oracle.com/cd/
B10501_01/server.920/a96520/concept.htm
8. Humphries, Mark, Hawkins, Michael.W. and Michelle C. Dy. Data Warehousing:
Architecture and Implementation.
9. Devlin, Barry. Data Warehouse: From Architecture to Implementation. Published by
Addison-Wesley, 1997.
10. Han, Jiawei, Micheline Kamber. Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques.
11. Tan, Pang-Ning, Vipin Kumar, Michael Steinnach. Introduction to Data Mining.

12. Gadkari, Prasad. Guide to E-Marketing.
13. Jaiswal, M.P. & Anjali Kaushik. e-CRM: Business & System Frontiers.
14. Rust, Roland T. and P.K. Kannan. e-Service-New Directions in Theory & Practice.
15. Strass, El-Ansary, Frost. e-Marketing.
16. Gadkari, Prasad. Guide to E-Marketing.
17. Jaiswal, M.P. & Anjali Kaushik. e-CRM: Business & System Frontiers.
18. Rust, Roland T. and P.K. Kannan. e-Service-New Directions in Theory & Practice.
19. Strass, El-Ansary, Frost. e-Marketing.
20. Batterley, Richard. Leading Through Relationship Marketing.
21. Garikaparthi, Madhavi. eCRM - Concepts & Cases.
22. Shajahan, S. 2006. Relationship Marketing. TMGH.
23. Sheth, Jagdish, Atul Parvatiyar. Handbook of Relationship Marketing.
24. Sheth, Parvatiyar, Shainesh. Customer Relationship Management.
25. Garikaparthi, Madhavi. ECRM-Concepts & Cases.
26. Shajahan, S. 2006. Relationship Marketing. TMGH
27. Agarwala Kamlesh N, Agrawala Prateek and Agarwala Deeksha: e-CRM, McMillan
Indian ltd. New Delhi
28. Kotler and Armstrong: Principles of Marketing: Prentice hall of India, New Delhi
29. Swift Ronald S; Accelerating Customer Relationship- Using CRM and Relationship
Technologies: Prentice Hall US.
30. Tiwana, Amrit: Essential Guide to knowledge Management, The E-Business and
CRM Applications: Prentice Hall

401 E-Customer Relationship Management

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

401 E-Customer Relationship Management

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

E Customer Relationship Management

 Know Your Customer

 Building Loyalty & Retention in Digital world

 Data Warehousing & Mining

 Digital Communities(Blogs Forum/FB pages)

 Handling Customer Complaints

 Customer Experience in Digital World

After going through this unit, you will be able to:

 Understand the importance of knowing customers

 Know what is up selling and cross selling.

 Be aware of operational, collaborative & analytical CRM.

 Discuss the concept of community

 Describe how to build partnership through community

 Analyse user generated content

 Explain the concept of blog

 State the reasons behind customer complaints

 Explain how complaints can act for the betterment of an organisation

 Elaborate on how to manage a complaint handling system

 Discuss the concepts of customer experience management

 Describe the importance of CEM

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

 Elaborate the steps of a good customer experience management process

 Evaluate why the people factor is the most important in CEM

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

Marketing is changing meaningfully in relation to the product, market segment, customer

Targeting, Attracting and Acquiring New Customer

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning (STP) is the logical and strategic outcome of a market

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

The segmentation is generally carried out on the basis of following 4 categories.

2. Psychographic – Based on personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.

3. Behavioral Economics – Based on economic profile of the consumers

4. Demographics – Based on the vital and measurable statistics of the population

THE DIGITAL MARKET SEGMENTATION PROCESS

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

Additional criteria for segment attractiveness are:

Check your Progress 1

1. _________ is repetitive behaviour resulting as an absence of Information seeking, and

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

Creating Digital profile of customers - personalities

motivations and behaviours.

campaign. This can significantly enhance digital marketing tactics by:

 Allowing you to keep focused on your audience’s needs and wants.

 Enriching the emotional impact of your content and campaign creative.

The popular steps to create a person are,

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

interests to their motivations and key day-to-day challenges.

Step 4 – Create it online and Download

How You Can Use Your Personalities:

Introduce Your Personality to Your Organisation

serve them better.”

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

Jane (insert name of your personality) do or need in this situation?

they need to hear.

you are marketing to.

Six basic types of online shoppers are,

'New to the Net' Shopper

Customer’s needs - New-to-the-Net shoppers require a very simple interface, an easy

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

Customer needs - It is important to cater to the fun-loving character of the enthusiast

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society

Market Research to Know your Customer

Some of the popular techniques of online research to know customer are,

Copyright© Symbiosis Open Education Society