Challenges of data management and analytics in omni-channel CRM

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.