A Practical Guide to CRM
This book is a guide to achieving customer satisfaction by choosing the right CRM systems, and explains how to use CRM to integrate all channels of customer contact.
TABLE OF CONTENTS A Practical Guide to CRM
Chapter 13: The Importance of Data
Overview
The objective of CRM understanding and managing customer relationships depends on the proper integration of a wide variety of data sources.
While the many flavors of CRM technology and IT infrastructures make it difficult to describe a "typical" CRM data architecture; the basic data architecture for any CRM initiative includes a data storehouse (whether it's a database, date mart or data warehouse) as the central hub. This repository of data absorbs information from sundry sources and then provides interaction internally and externally.
Databases: Typically found throughout the corporate environment. A database is a set of related files that is created and managed by a database management system (DBMS) or if a relational database by a relational database management system (RDBMS). The databases that a CRM system can most effectively use are the relational databases. In non-relational systems (hierarchical, network), records in one file contain embedded pointers to the locations of records in another, such as customers to orders and vendors to purchases. These are fixed links set up ahead of time to speed up daily processing. In a relational database, relationships between files are created by comparing data, such as account numbers and names. A relational system has the flexibility to take any two or more files and generate a new file from the records that meet the matching criteria. Routine queries often involve more than one data file. For example, a customer file and an order file can be linked in...
Copyright Janice Reynolds 2002 under license agreement with Books24x7
