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Customer Relationship Management Solutions

Over the past few years, many companies have implemented operational customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and these companies are now analyzing customer behavior to plan and optimize marketing tactics and improve customer service programs. As the volume and availability of customer data increases, companies are turning to customer analytic applications to help them identify the tastes and preferences of particular target markets to create more relevant offerings and improve the efficiency of marketing dollars.

Customer and marketing analysis presents unique data complexity and analytical workflow challenges. MicroStrategy has the only business intelligence platform on the market today that is capable of processing the magnitude of data required for effective and meaningful customer relationship management that can positively affect the bottom line.

The analytical power combined with the intuitive interface of the MicroStrategy platform makes examining customer behavior, uncovering trends and taking action easy.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Database Management Software

Customer database management software stores, organizes, and analyzes customer information. That customer information can include:

  • customer activity data – sales, promotions, customer support, surveys, website visits, interaction frequency
  • demographic data – education levels, zip code, salary bands, age group, religious affiliation, home owner/renter, marital status, loyalty
  • psychographic data (sometimes referred to as interest, attitudes, and opinions or IAO) – social class, lifestyles, behavior, opinions, values, hobbies

Customer database management software is critical to marketing professionals as they determine investments in product development, craft effective advertising messages, execute sales and marketing campaigns, understand customer satisfaction, discover trends, improve customer retention and lifetime value, and run loyalty programs.

Customer Database Management Software is part of the larger methodology of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is a strategy for managing the customer experience through the use of information about a customer, the customer’s product or service experiences, and the history of interactions with the customer, The key factors in any successful CRM implementation are Data availability and quality. Enterprise-class Customer Database Management applications are the foundation for any successful CRM solution.

What is Customer Data Integration?

Just as Customer Database Management Software provides the necessary access to the customer data, Customer Data Integration (CDI) provides the processes to integrate the data from it's transaction systems into a data warehouse optimized for reporting, monitoring and analysis.

Customer Database Management Software Requirements

The effort to win and retain customers is fierce. Over the past decade, it has intensified given the thousands of options presented to customers via the Web. Customer database management software helps the marketing professional compete effectively for those customers. As the amount and types of data collected increase, customer database management software must evolve to changing analytical and usage requirements. Dedicated or narrowly focused pre-packaged customer database management software applications are too basic and inflexible to meet today's marketing demands.

Modern customer database management software requires:

  • Rapid and flexible application evolution
  • Investigative analysis through transaction level data
  • Advanced analytics that can predict future outcomes
  • Scale to the ever increasing number of users (marketing professionals, customer support representatives, suppliers, customers themselves)
  • Secure customer data

Customer Database Management Software and MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy business intelligence (BI) software is ideally suited for customer database management applications. Only MicroStrategy delivers the analytical flexibility required to continually evolve your customer database management software around your customers' ever changing needs. Specifically, MicroStrategy BI applications provide:

  • Application Flexibility ‐ Metadata Based Applications
    MicroStrategy BI applications can evolve as quickly as your customers' needs. Whether it means quickly changing reports, modifying metrics, or changing the underlying database structure, MicroStrategy customer database management software can do it quickly because it is driven from a single, object orientated metadata. This single metadata stores definitions of reports and metrics, for example, as objects. Each object can they be used in combination with others (kind of like building blocks) to create any analysis needed. What's more, once an object is changed once, it is automatically updated everywhere it used which eliminates errors and minimizes administration costs.
  • Investigation Analysis ‐ Drill Anywhere
    MicroStrategy BI applications offer unparalleled data investigation through the largest data volumes, which is critical for scouring customer data. MicroStrategy lets you drill anywhere through the data, not just up and down, to find relationships and conduct root-issue analysis. Additionally, you can add calculations and metrics; conduct time-series analysis; pivot, page-by, sort, and filter data to discover and understand your customers' needs.
  • Advanced Analytics
    MicroStrategy offers a comprehensive range of analytics for customer database management applications. MicroStrategy has over 200+ statistical, logical, financial, and mathematical functions available. Moreover, MicroStrategy offers predictive analytics using regression, clustering, market basket, decision tree, and neural network analysis to understand, segment, and target customers for promotions.
  • User Scalability
    MicroStrategy's BI architecture is specifically designed to scale to the largest number of uses using multi-layered caching, clustering, load balancing, and true 64-bit compliant code. MicroStrategy boasts some of the largest in-production BI applications from well-known customers, instilling confidence that your customer database management application will meet the needs of all your constituents, whether internal or external.
  • Security
    Customer data must be kept absolutely private. With more people accessing sensitive data, it is imperative to secure access to data and even individual metrics. MicroStrategy provides Access Control to individual metrics and data creating a comprehensive and centrally controlled security policy. Deploying customer database management software applications widely is only possible with this level of security sophistication.

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