Building competitive advantage via CRM based on data warehouse and data mining

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is providing a novel approach for managing the relationships between a corporation and its customers towards maximal profitability and sustainability. Data mining and data warehouse are the useful information technologies, which provide powerful means for extracting and utilizing the business information from historical data resources and runtime data flows. This paper reviews the objectives, functionalities, and development trends of CRM, discusses the architecture, data model and development methodologies of CRM systems based on data warehouse and data mining, then outlines the applications of integrated CRM systems in decision making, including business administration, marketing, customer service, customer management, and credit evaluation. Eventually, it describes some problems and challenges for further research.