Factors Affecting Design Decisions for Customer Relationship Management Data Warehouses

Abstract

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy that integrates concepts of knowledge management, data mining, and data warehousing in order to support an organization’s decision-making process to retain long-term and profitable relationships with its customers. Key factors for successfully implementing CRM (e.g., data quality issues, organizational readiness, customer strategies, selection of appropriate KPIs, and the design of the data warehouse model) are discussed with the main thrust of the chapter focusing on CRM analyses and the impact of those analyses on CRM data warehousing design decisions. This chapter then presents a robust multidimensional starter model that supports CRM analyses. Additional research contributions include the introduction of two new measures, percent success ratio and CRM suitability ratio by which CRM models can be evaluated, the identification/ classification of CRM queries, and a preliminary heuristic for designing data warehouses to support CRM analyses.