Data Mining:A Tool for Customer Relationship Management

Revolution of information technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular has created opportunity of building better relationships with customers. Until recently, simplifying the management and organization of customer information was main focus of Customer Relationship Management software's. Such software, called Customer Relationship Management, mainly focused on creating a database of customer's vital information. However, the sheer volumes of this customer information created need for organizations to look for methods and techniques to automatically and intelligently gain insight into customers and their needs through data analysis. Data Mining is popular means of analyzing large volumes of data in order to extract the valuable information/knowledge hidden in this data. There is an emerging trend of using data mining tools for Customer Relationship Management by the organizations in order to analyze and understand buying behavior of customers and their characteristics, so as to retain existing customers, acquire new potential customers and maximize their value. This paper presents concepts of Customer Relationship Management and Data Mining, framework of Customer Relationship Management and Data Mining, application of various data mining techniques in Customer Relationship Management.