Challenges of Data Management and Analytics in Omni-Channel CRM

Trautmann Heike, Vossen Gottfried, Homann Leschek, Carnein Matthias, Kraume Karsten

Abstract
Data Management and Data Analytics are of huge importance to Business Process Outsourcing Providers in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in order to offer tailor-made CRM Solutions to their business clients during presales, sales and aftersales. These solutions support business clients to improve their internal processes, as well as their customer service in a variety of communication channels (including e-mail, chat, social media, private messages, etc.) to reach out to end customers in an efficient way. As customer interactions may happen via various channels basically at any time, a crucial challenge is to efficiently store and integrate the data of the various channels in order to obtain a unified customer profile. This paper abstracts from the underlying platforms and instead considers the requirements to CRM solutions for the various communication channels, in order to devise a uniform and corporate-wide data architecture for an omni-channel customer view to maximize the business clients’ value in customer retention and customer centric analytics. Especially, online customer segmentation integrating channel usage and preferences is presented as a very promising means for constructing a self-energising information loop which will lead to highly improved customer service along the whole customer journey.

Keywords
Omni-Channel CRM; Big Data; Customer Segmentation; Data Architecture