Designing data warehouses to support customer relationship management analysis

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that integrates concepts ofknowledge management, data mining, and data warehousing in order to support anorganization’s decision-making process to retain long-term and profitable relationshipswith its customers. While it is clear from the literature review that the design of the datawarehouse and analysis capabilities are essential to the success of CRM, there are noagreed upon standardized rules for how to design a data warehouse to support CRM. Yet,the design of the CRM data warehouse model directly impacts an organization’s ability toreadily perform analyses that are specific to CRM. Therefore, the broad research questionis: “how to design a data warehouse to support CRM analyses?” Key factors forsuccessfully implementing CRM (e.g. data quality issues, organizational readiness,customer strategies, selection of appropriate KPIs, and the design of the data warehousemodel) are presented with the main thrust of the presentation focusing on CRM analysesand the impact of those analyses on CRM data warehousing design decisions. A robustmultidimensional starter model that supports CRM analyses is also presented. Additionalresearch contributions include the introduction of a CRM suitability ratio by which CRMmodels can be evaluated, the identification/classification of CRM queries, and apreliminary heuristic for designing data warehouses to support CRM analyses.