Bose Problem CRM

Before discussing Bose Problem CRM let’s see the clear scenario behind. The World Wide Web (WWW, Web) not only contains a vast amount of useful information but also provides a powerful infrastructure for communication and information sharing. It has changed the face how business does business in today’s world. Many activities including education and research are getting on the Web and many organizations rely on the Web for competitive advantage. Nowadays, the Web is continuing to expand at an amazing rate as a medium for conducting business in addition to disseminating information. Cheung (1998) noted, the Web used for many diversified business purposes including direct sales, advertisement, customer support, etc, and the astonishing growth of Web users is clear evidence of this. We all know that the number of Web users is remarkably increasing, too—day by day and even minute by minute!

With the growth of Web users, the Web is producing large volumes of data and data analysis to extract information from the data is considered as a significant topic. Recently, techniques such as data warehousing, data mining, and OLAP (on-line analytical processing) are steadily being studied, and Web data mining to extract information from Web data has become a popular research area.

Advances in information technology are changing the research surrounding the business and marketing fields, and a considerable number of studies - for example , Peters and Saidin (2000), Stone and Good (2001) - have been conducted on the use of information technology. A focusing topic in the fields is electronic customer relationship management (CRM). Bose (2002) noted, CRM involves acquisition, analysis and use of knowledge about customers in order to sell more goods or services and to do it more efficiently. In other words, CRM is a process designed to grasp features of customers and apply those features to marketing activities. It differs from classical marketing in the point that it uses “customer centric thinking” in marketing. The primary reasons for the emergence of CRM are the changes in the marketing environment and advances in Web technology.

We exhibit a relationship between the asymmetric communication problem of Adler and Maggs (1998) and the hotlink assignment problem of Bose et al (2000) usually called Bose Problem CRM. By generalizing previous results on the hotlink problem and then exploiting this relationship we present a new asymmetric communication protocol with different performance bounds than previous protocols.

Users are having considerable difficulty getting a return on the multimillion-dollar investments they have made in customer relationship management (CRM) software from Siebel Systems Inc., according to a recent report.

Customers also raised other issues about the software, citing the difficulty of training employees to use the software and problems with implementations going over budget and over time, according to the survey, just issued by Wellesley, Mass.-based Nucleus Research Inc. The survey was conducted in June through interviews with 23 referenced customers from Siebel's own Web site.

Most damning, perhaps, is the finding that 61% of the customers were convinced that they had yet to achieve return on investment after two years with the Siebel applications, which cost an average of about $6.6 million over a three-year period.