Analytical Platform for Customer Relationship Management

This chapter describes two specific applications of the data-intensive architecture to customer relationship management (CRM) database analysis carried out by a team at Polish IT services firm Comarch SA. Readers are introduced to CRM analysis in the telecoms domain through a scene-setting discussion that assumes no prior knowledge. They are then taken through the process of analyzing customer data to predict whether and when customers may move to a new service provider-a phenomenon known as customer "churn". An example in this chapter shows how data can be used to understand how best to offer existing customers complementary services. The chapter offers some thoughts on the effective exploitation of data-intensive methods for business intelligence in a production capacity, including considerations of problem scale. It summarizes the key findings from the author's "classical" experiments in CRM data mining.