Discovering diamonds under coal piles: Revealing exclusive business intelligence about online consumers through the use of Web Data Mining techniques embedded in an analytical customer relationship management framework

摘要

Web Mining has gained prominence over the last decade. This rise is concomitant with the upsurge of pure players, the multiple challenges of data deluge, the trend toward automation and integration within organization, as well as a desire for hyper segmentation. Confronted, partly or totally, with these multiple issues, companies recourse increasingly to replicate the data mining toolbox on web data. Although much is known about the technical aspect of WM, little is known about the extent to which WM actually fits within a customer relationship management system, designed at attracting and retaining the maximum amount of customers. An exploratory study involving twelve senior professionals and scholars indicated that WM is well-suited to achieve most of the customer relationship management objective, with regards to the profiling of existing web customers. The results of this study suggest that the engineering of WM processes into analytic customer relationship management systems, may yield highly beneficial returns, provided that some guidelines are scrupulously followed.