Customer retention, customer conversion and better customer relationship management (CRM) are important factors for many types of businesses. Good customer relationship management has the objective to maximize the customer lifetime value for which a perfect understanding of the customer is mandatory. If this is not done in a proper way it may adversely affect the business.

How do we get to correctly understand our customers? Through valid and relevant data of course! Thus the quality of the data becomes important. We have seen that most of the time the data quality may itself be low and this can lead to a misunderstanding or an incorrect understanding of the customer. How can we be sure about the data quality? What steps have to be taken to deeply understand the customer and then use the data pattern discoveries to take positive actions to enhance business?

Given below are a few suggestions,

• Combine different data mining techniques
• Multiple source data has to be integrated before the data mining process
• Different types of data also have to be integrated
• Data cleaning has to be done
• Confidentiality of personal data has to be handled with care
• Legal aspects of data and its ownership has to be addressed
• Pattern discovery in data has to be tested
• First decide on the level of customer model depending on the type of business
• Data acquisition should be low cost / accurate and non-intrusive
• Data must be well evaluated and quality level should be improved
• Action mechanisms may be integrated with the discovery process itself
• Develop methods to integrate new knowledge with previous knowledge

Managed Outsource Solutions is a US based data entry and data mining company that offers affordable yet professional services in data entry, data cleaning, data conversion, KDD (knowledge discovery in data), data capture, data processing and data mining to its clients in the US, Canada the UK and Australia.

Labels: CRM, customer retention, data mining, KDD, pattern discovery