Social Network Analysis in Marketing

The chapter describes a method how to perform a classification task without any demographic features and based only on the social network data. The concept of such collective classification facilitates to identify potential customers by means of services used or products purchased by the current customers, i.e. classes they belong to as well as using social relationships between the known and potential customers. As a result, a personalized offer can be prepared for the new clients. This innovative marketing method can boost targeted marketing campaigns.

Sentiment Analysis in Business Intelligence

Sentiment Analysis is a novel and broad area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) aiming to understand people’s sentiments and opinions about a given topic. In particular, this chapter focuses on the application of Sentiment Analysis to automatically evaluate online products and services reviews. Undoubtedly, the information in customer reviews is of great interest to both companies and consumers. Companies and organizations spend a huge amount of money to find customers’ opinions and sentiments, since this information is useful to exploit their marketing-mix in order to affect consumer satisfaction. Individuals are interested in others’ experiences when purchasing a product or hiring a service. Moreover, online opinions clearly influence the companies’ reputation. For this reason, Sentiment Analysis is expected to become a key component of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. However, the task of mining opinions in text, as any other NLP task, is a very challenging one. The objective of this chapter is to present the reader the main ideas of Sentiment Analysis and its practical applications in business intelligence. It also discussed the approaches and techniques used so far, and the corpora and resources most widely used in the development of sentiment-driven systems.

Partner Relationship Management

R&D activities normally require consortium formation due to the different areas of expertise involved in such activities. On the one hand, it is not trivial for a R&D entity to decide in which projects it should participate, or which are the adequate partners to form a consortium. On the other hand, acceptation of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems has become a reality for the industry and researchers in areas, such as marketing, communication, or computer science. These tools contain in their basic packages features to manage key company actives, including partners and clients. However, R&D environments involve special characteristics and traits, which require an extension of functionalities in order to be accurately covered. The increasing strength and usefulness of semantic technologies have led to innovative decision support processes and management of partners and R&D call for proposals. This work introduces an architecture that integrates R&D processes with the CRM philosophy.

CRM for Innovation in European Companies

In recent years, customer relationship management (CRM) has been a topic of the utmost importance for scholars and managers. Literature suggests, however, that it is difficult to demonstrate both tangible returns and also intangible attributes of these benefits, such as innovation derived from the use of CRM. The aim of the chapter is to analyze the implementation of CRM and its influence on a firm’s ability for innovation. Literature on CRM and innovation is reviewed and a theoretical model is proposed. Research findings from a sample of European companies prove that CRM is beneficial for innovation in many countries. However, there were no conclusive results from other countries. These findings have important implications in assisting organizations in their CRM initiatives for managing customer knowledge and enhancing innovation.

Knowledge-Driven Customer Support Services

A Customers Relationship Management (CRM) program aspires to manage the relationship between a company and its customers as a key to success, in view of the fact that good relationships with customers lead to higher customers’ satisfaction. Despite the importance of CRM programs, their failure rates are high, partly because CRM service providers cannot resolve customers’ claims on time, which often occur due to the difficulty to find valuable knowledge and reproduce solutions. Therefore, integrating Knowledge Management (KM) activities, and in particular social Web 2.0 applications, within a CRM solution suit may enable to significantly enhance the efficiency of the organizational CRM program and build a knowledge-driven customer support services solution. The proposed CRM solution is based on a research case study conducted within customer service department of a large software organization.

Semantic Technologies in Motion

Semantic technologies are evolving to reach a mature state. Given the importance of Information Technologies in general and Internet in particular to organizations worldwide, these technologies can provide enhanced functionality to both existing and future solutions. This chapter provides an overview of the use of semantic technologies in several application domains, namely: construction & real estate, customer relationship management, e-government, e-learning, environmental sciences, health domain, human resource management, Information Technology, manufacturing, media and tourism, and cultural heritage. More than a hundred references are provided to support the idea that semantic technologies are applicable to almost all areas of interest.

Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Meet the Relevant Challenge of Customer Relationship Management for the U.S. Academic Libraries in the 21st Century Using 121 e-Agent Framework

The main contributions of the chapter are 1) defining relevance challenge of CRM for U.S. academic libraries in the 21st century and applying social Semantic Web technologies to address the relevance challenge of CRM using 121 e-Agent framework in the Web as an infrastructure; 2) binding OLTP, OLAP, and Online Ontological Processing to social Semantic Web applications in CRM; 3) adding trust management to the linked data layer with a touch of tagging, categorizing, query log analysis, and social ranking as part of the underlying structure for distributed customer data filtering on the Web in CRM applications; 4) making the approach extensible to address relevance challenge of CRM in other fields.

Exploding Web 3.0 and Web 2.0 for Sales Processes Definition

The evolution of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies has lead to a new way of Customer Relationship Management. Web 2.0 provides communication and collaboration elements that can improve on the one hand the quality of the relationships with customers and, on the other hand, the collaboration among the members of the company. Web 3.0 provides semantic information for the knowledge available, as well as shared vocabularies by means of ontologies. In this chapter the main trends and implications of these technologies are summarized. Taking into account the characteristics of social and semantic technologies, a new architecture is proposed in order to facilitate the communication among customers and sales experts. Furthermore a framework for automating sales processes based in the collaborative knowledge representation collected by the experts and, if required, the customers is presented. The proposed framework goes beyond a single recommender system or a social tool. Its aim is to cover the issues related to the necessity of integrate the customer in the overall sales process, exploiting the mentioned advantages of these new Web technologies.

Sales Force Automation Usage and Performance

This chapter examines the relationships between SFA usage and sales performance among IT salesforce by adopting the technology adoption model (TAM). Data was collected from 150 IT sales persons in a questionnaire survey to examine the relationships between SFA usage (organizing, route plan, presenting and reporting, informing, support, processing and record keeping) and salesperson performance (efficiency, administrative efficiency, control and communication efficiency). Findings from multiple regression analyses indicate that route plan, organizing, presenting, reporting and processing have significant relationships with salesperson performance. The study suggests strongly the significant role of appropriate SFA usage in enhancing the performance of sales personnel in the IT industry. Implications and suggestions for future research on SFA are also presented.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Implementation Intensity and Performance

Competition in the Web-hosting industry has become very intense in recent years as the market becomes saturated with existing as well as new players. To survive in this very competitive environment, Web-hosting companies need to be more responsive to their customer needs. Customer relationship management is thought of as a key solution to this. Thus the purpose of this study was to test the effect of CRM implementation intensity on CRM performance among Web-hosting companies. The more intense the implementation the better the CRM performance should be. Data was collected via online questionnaires from 81 respondents representing various online Web-hosting companies around the globe. The results indicated CRM implementation intensity had a direct positive influence on CRM performance.