ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a managerial view of how all these valuable bits and bytes can be gathered, managed, analyzed, and applied to provide real customer insight so that effective, ongoing customer-brand relationships can be built and maintained. It begins with a brief description of the varieties of internal and external customer information that contained in a database and how these data can be integrated, consolidated, and applied to managerial tasks. Customer data integration practices conducted for the American Productivity and Quality Center, Schultz developed a framework depicting how organizations best utilize and integrate the various sources of customer knowledge that they possess or can access. At the tactical level, the simplest application of customer data would be to create a segmentation or aggregation scheme. Given the capabilities of databases today, the chapter defines target customer groups according to measurable behaviors and then using other types of demographic, geographic, or attitudinal data to help explain or describe the group.
