Integration between Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence

Abstract: The main purpose of any Customer Relationship Management(CRM) system of any customer-focused organization is to build new and retain old relationships with its customers.Such CRM systems provide customer data so that its users or top management can make correct decisions in order to improve organization’s performance. Nowadays, advanced analytics in the form of Business Intelligence (BI) can be used to perform extra analysis on such customer data. Doing so, users or decision makers can have the right customer information at right time at right location and the organization’s performance can be improved. This research studies the integration between CRM and BI of a prominent customer-oriented organization named Skånetrafiken. In this research, a functional framework of CRM and BI integration is derived considering functional frameworks of individual CRM and BI. Also, this framework is primarily based on basic People, Process and Technology principle. This framework represents the importance of good quality data, benefits of BI and key enablers of any successful CRM and BI integrated system. The key enablers of such successful BI and CRM systems are such as customer-centric approach, enterprise-wide strategy, cross-functional integration and technology-driven business processes. This is a qualitative research where data is collected in the form of semi-structured interviews and analyzed further using coding techniques.