Q1. Discuss how crm is used effectively by an organization as a business strategy.

Ans. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a combination of organizational strategy,

information systems, and technology that is focused on providing better customer service.
CRM uses emerging technology that allows organizations to provide fast and effective
customer service by developing a relationship with each customer through the effective use of
customer database information systems. The objectives of CRM are to acquire new
customers, retain the right current customers, and grow the relationship with an organization's
existing customers. An integrated business model that ties together technology, information
systems, and business processes along the entire value chain of an organization is critical to
the success of CRM.
CRM can also be considered a corporate strategy because it is a fundamental approach to
doing business. The goal is to be customer-focused and customer-driven, running all aspects
of the business to satisfy the customers by addressing their requirements for products and by
providing high-quality, responsive customer service. Companies that adopt this approach are
called customer-centric, rather than product-centric.
To be customer-centric, companies need to collect and store meaningful information in a
comprehensive customer database. A customer database is an organized collection of
information about individual customers or prospects. The database must be current,
accessible, and actionable in order to support the generation of leads for new customers
while supporting sales and the maintenance of current customer relationships. Smart
organizations are collecting information every time a customer comes into contact with the
organization. Based on what they know about the individual customer, organizations can
customize market offerings, services, programs, messages, and choice of media. A customer
database ideally would contain the customer's history of past purchases, demographics,
activities/interests/opinions, preferred media, and other useful information. Also, this database
should be available to any organizational units that have contact with the customer.

Q2. Discuss the activities taken up by the company for developing and implementing channel
strategy.

Ans-->A marketing plan is a written document that details the necessary actions to achieve
one or more marketing objectives. It can be for a product or Service (economics)|service, a
brand, or a product line. Marketing plans cover between one and five years.
A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan. Solid marketing strategy is the
foundation of a well-written marketing plan. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, a
marketing plan without a sound strategic foundation is of little use.
The marketing planning process: In most organizations, "strategic planning" is an annual
process, typically covering just the year ahead. Occasionally, a few organizations may look at
a practical plan which stretches three or more years ahead.
To be most effective, the plan has to be formalized, usually in written form, as a formal
"marketing plan." The essence of the process is that it moves from the general to the specific;
from the overall objectives of the organization down to the individual Objective (goal)|action
plan for a part of one marketing program. It is also an interactive process, so that the draft
output of each stage is checked to see what impact it has on the earlier stages - and is
amended.

Q4. Explain what are the trends and keys for customer retention process.
The number one strategy to improve customer retention is…
Finding new and unique ways to create a partnership with customers. People will care when
they share. Help customers put skin in the game by:
• Involving them in the design and delivery of service
• Soliciting their ideas and suggestions
• Begging for feedback on ways to improve their experience
• Create forums for customer participation (like boards of customers, customer
advisory teams, VOC initiatives)
• Spend time with customers on their turf or neutral turf (like Harley’s HOG—Harley
Owners Group)
• Crafting chat rooms aimed at beta testing, experimenting, piloting products and
services with customers.
• Invite customers to company functions—picnics, meetings, social outings, etc.

Q5. Elucidate steps of shipping and order tracking system in CRM.

Order-Taking: It’s amazingly simple

Equipped with state-of-the-art order generation tools, your sales executive can add new
orders even while they are out on the field. Kapture reduces the time taken to complete a
customer’s order with fewer back-and-forth between the executives and managers.

Workflow and Approvals:

When problems find solutions on their own!: Kapture can automatically assign an order to the
relevant employee, letting managers easily approve each of them with a single tap. Improve
data exchange between your teams so that your leads can be quickly converted into
customers.
Order Details and Status:

A status that’s always updated :

Store your order information in Kapture’s central CRM database and easily access
information like customer details, rate structures, order status and follow-up dates. Send
invoices and deliver the stock to the customer in minimal time.
Customer and Payment History:

Orders so nice, make it happen twice:

View a customer’s entire order and payment history and retrieve the relevant data like product
purchased, order quantity and payment status. Review past orders and study your customers’
purchasing patterns to make better offers.
Delivery Notifications

Q26. Discuss the need for Lead Management for an organization.

Lead management is the process of tracking and managing prospective customers.

Sometimes referred to as customer acquisition management or contact management,
it generally encompasses the following processes:
• Lead generation: Businesses create consumer interest and inquiry into products or
services through a range of marketing tactics. These often include blog posts,
advertisements, white papers, social media, events, and PR campaigns.
• Customer inquiry and capture: Consumers of marketing respond with interest and
their data is recorded. This creates a sales lead.
• Filtering, grading, distribution, and contact: Leads are sorted by the validity of the
request, prioritized based on likelihood of becoming a customer, and then dispersed to sales
reps to be contacted. Depending on the size of your marketing program, a lot of work can go
into defining how to accurately categorize and sort individual leads.
• Lead nurturing: Leads are sorted by contacted or uncontacted and scheduled for
follow-up processes. They may be put into drip-marketing campaigns, or followed-up with on
the phone by a company rep.
If the process ends with a sale, the lead has successfully traveled down the sales funnel and
emerged as a customer. But the work doesn’t end there.
Lead management becomes more complex as companies scale – managing 200 leads is a
lot different than managing 2,000 or 20,000 or even 200,000. And when those leads turn into
customers, businesses must continue to nurture those relationships. In short, follow up is
critical to maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction and sales efficiency.
Lead vs. Customer  
Lead management is often mentioned as a feature when discussing customer relationship
management (CRM), so it’s sometimes difficult to figure out the difference between the terms.
Here’s a breakdown: 
• Prospect: person in your target demographic and market
• Lead: person in your target demographic and market, who wants to learn more about
solutions you offer
• Customer: a person who’s purchased your solution
Although this seems clear, even a straight forward process can become complex as your
business begins to produce a variety of sales opportunities. Lead management makes your
sales team more effective by creating a pool of interested consumers and then filtering out the
unqualified leads.

Q27. Explain data warehouse and its characteristics.

Data warehousing can be defined as particular area of comfort wherein subject oriented,
non-volatile collection of data is done as to support the management’s process.
It senses the limited data within the multiple data resources.It has built-in data
resources that are modulated upon the data transaction.
Characteristics of Data Warehouse:
Data warehouse can be modulated when the people has a common way of
explaining new things that are emerged as particular subject. Here are some of
the few characteristics of data warehousing.
Subject oriented:

It can be performed on a particular subject area. It means the data

warehousing process is intended to deal with a particular subject that is more
defined.

A deep understanding will help in developing sales procedures that are defined
within the bounds. It deals with all the subject matters that have warehouse.

Time variant:

It discovers different time limits that are modulated within the large amounts of
data and are held in online transaction processing.It is meant by time variant
when the data is set into the causes of the support of staging files.It normally
proceeds with the majority of data that is handled by large tables containing
updated facts.

Non volatile:It encompasses the high quantity of data that enters into change
within the selected quantity on logical business. It enumerates the analysis in
the warehouse technologies.Non volatility will make people understand what
has occurred. It makes a clear sense of analysis that is done.

Integrated:

It is similar to subject orientation that is made in consistent format. It should

resolve the problems and are made to be disparate problem. It has finite number
of procedures for the issues such as naming conventions, conflicts, units of
measure, inconsistent values. It manages different subject related warehouse
information.

Functions of Data Warehouse:It works as a repository and the data here is

held by an organization that endures the facilities to backup data functions.It
reduces the cost of storage system and even the backup data at organizational
level.It has stored facts about the tables that have high granular transaction
levels that are monitored so as to define the data warehousing techniques.
Functions involved are:

• Data consolidations
 • Data cleaning
• Data integration

Applications of Data Warehouse:The business executives help in performing

various other businesses to organize and analyze the detailed data description.
These instances are executed within the loop and are monitored within a closed
loop. Data warehousing is mainly followed in the following fields:

• Banking services
• Financial services
• Retail sectors
• Consumer goods
• Controlled manufacturing
28. Explain multi-dimensional data model
The multidimensional data model is an integral part of On-Line Analytical Processing,
or OLAP. Because OLAP is on-line, it must provide answers quickly; analysts pose
iterative queries during interactive sessions, not in batch jobs that run overnight. And
because OLAP is also analytic, the queries are complex. The multidimensional data
model is designed to solve complex queries in real time.
The multidimensional data model is important because it enforces simplicity.
As Ralph Kimball states in his landmark book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit:
"The central attraction of the dimensional model of a business is its
simplicity.... that simplicity is the fundamental key that allows users to
understand databases, and allows software to navigate databases efficiently."
The multidimensional data model is composed of logical cubes, measures,
dimensions, hierarchies, levels, and attributes. The simplicity of the model is
inherent because it defines objects that represent real-world business entities.
Analysts know which business measures they are interested in examining,
which dimensions and attributes make the data meaningful, and how the
dimensions of their business are organized into levels and hierarchies.
Figure 2-1 shows the relationships among the logical objects.
Q28.Discuss about data mining issues.
Data mining is not that easy. The algorithm used are very complex. The data is not
available at one place it needs to be integrated form the various heterogeneous data
sources. These factors also creates some issues. Here in this tutorial we will discuss the
major issues regarding:

• Mining Methodology and User Interaction

• Performance Issues
• Diverse Data Types Issues
The following diagram describes the major issues.
Mining Methodology and User Interaction Issues
It refers to the following kind of issues:
• Mining different kinds of knowledge in databases. - The need of different
users is not the same. And Different user may be in interested in different kind of
knowledge. Therefore it is necessary for data mining to cover broad range of
knowledge discovery task.
• Interactive mining of knowledge at multiple levels of abstraction. - The data
mining process needs to be interactive because it allows users to focus the search for
patterns, providing and refining data mining requests based on returned results.
• Incorporation of background knowledge. - To guide discovery process and to
express the discovered patterns, the background knowledge can be used. Background
knowledge may be used to express the discovered patterns not only in concise terms
but at multiple level of abstraction.
• Data mining query languages and ad hoc data mining. - Data Mining Query
language that allows the user to describe ad hoc mining tasks, should be integrated
with a data warehouse query language and optimized for efficient and flexible data
mining.
• Presentation and visualization of data mining results. - Once the patterns
are discovered it needs to be expressed in high level languages, visual
representations. This representations should be easily understandable by the users.
• Handling noisy or incomplete data. - The data cleaning methods are required
that can handle the noise, incomplete objects while mining the data regularities. If data
cleaning methods are not there then the accuracy of the discovered patterns will be
poor.
• Pattern evaluation. - It refers to interestingness of the problem. The patterns
discovered should be interesting because either they represent common knowledge or
lack novelty.

Performance Issues
It refers to the following issues:
• Efficiency and scalability of data mining algorithms. - In order to effectively
extract the information from huge amount of data in databases, data mining algorithm
must be efficient and scalable.
• Parallel, distributed, and incremental mining algorithms. - The factors such
as huge size of databases, wide distribution of data,and complexity of data mining
methods motivate the development of parallel and distributed data mining algorithms.
These algorithm divide the data into partitions which is further processed parallel.
Then the results from the partitions is merged. The incremental algorithms, updates
databases without having mine the data again from scratch.
Diverse Data Types Issues
• Handling of relational and complex types of data. - The database may
contain complex data objects, multimedia data objects, spatial data, temporal data etc.
It is not possible for one system to mine all these kind of data.
• Mining information from heterogeneous databases and global information
systems. - The data is available at different data sources on LAN or WAN. These data
source may be structured, semi structured or unstructured. Therefore mining
knowledge from them adds challenges to data mining.

Q) Explain rule-based algorithm?.

Rule-based classifier makes use of a set of IF-THEN rules for classification.
We can express a rule in the following from −
IF condition THEN conclusion
Let us consider a rule R1,
R1: IF age = youth AND student = yes
THEN buy_computer = yes
 The IF part of the rule is called rule antecedent or precondition.
 The THEN part of the rule is called rule consequent.
 The antecedent part the condition consist of one or more attribute tests
and these tests are logically ANDed.
 The consequent part consists of class prediction.
 We can also write rule R1 as follows −
 R1: (age = youth) ^ (student = yes))(buys
computer = yes)
 If the condition holds true for a given tuple, then the antecedent is
satisfied.

Rule Extraction
Here we will learn how to build a rule-based classifier by extracting IF-
THEN rules from a decision tree.
To extract a rule from a decision tree −
  One rule is created for each path from the root to the leaf node.
 To form a rule antecedent, each splitting criterion is logically ANDed.
 The leaf node holds the class prediction, forming the rule consequent.

Rule Induction Using Sequential Covering Algorithm

Sequential Covering Algorithm can be used to extract IF-THEN rules form
the training data. We do not require to generate a decision tree first. In this
algorithm, each rule for a given class covers many of the tuples of that class.
Some of the sequential Covering Algorithms are AQ, CN2, and RIPPER. As
per the general strategy the rules are learned one at a time. For each time
rules are learned, a tuple covered by the rule is removed and the process
continues for the rest of the tuples. This is because the path to each leaf in a
decision tree corresponds to a rule.
Note − The Decision tree induction can be considered as learning a set of
rules simultaneously.
The Following is the sequential learning Algorithm where rules are learned
for one class at a time. When learning a rule from a class Ci, we want the rule
to cover all the tuples from class C only and no tuple form any other class.

Rule Pruning
The rule is pruned is due to the following reason −
 The Assessment of quality is made on the original set of training data.
The rule may perform well on training data but less well on subsequent
data. That's why the rule pruning is required.
 The rule is pruned by removing conjunct. The rule R is pruned, if
pruned version of R has greater quality than what was assessed on an
independent set of tuples.
FOIL is one of the simple and effective method for rule pruning. For a given
rule R,
FOIL_Prune = pos - neg / pos + neg
where pos and neg is the number of positive tuples covered by R,
respectively.
Note − This value will increase with the accuracy of R on the pruning set.
Hence, if the FOIL_Prune value is higher for the pruned version of R, then
we prune R.