Accelerating Customer Relationships: Using CRM and Relationship Technologies [Paperback]

During that time, the advent of increasingly customer-centric business philosophies has made data warehousing technology an indispensable corporate tool. As a result, NCR's Teradata division has grown in prominence to become the company's primary revenue source. Accelerating Customer Relationships, by NCR's VP of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions Ron Swift, leverages all of the company's breadth of understanding and experience in data management.

Drawing on scores of high-end corporate examples, Swift portrays how companies have applied the technologies of warehousing and data analysis to enhance their relationships with customers, to win new customers and to identify which ones are a burden on the bottom line. From a technology perspective, the book drills into every aspect of CRM-centric warehousing, from data mining and business intelligence tools to the latest technologies for analysing click-stream data in real-time. But Swift talks about more than just the technology. On a business level, he investigates how companies can best ensure a return on investment from risky data warehousing projects, while also looking at how companies can deal with issues such as data privacy.

But the book is at its most alluring when portraying companies' individual achievements. As well as a scattering of user anecdotes, there are 20 detailed case studies spread across companies in financial services, manufacturing, retail, travel, telecoms health and entertainment. Some lack technical depth on how companies have successfully built and exploited customers' data warehouses, but most contain fascinating insights.

One example is how Delta Air Lines redeveloped its air miles scheme. Traditionally, the airline industry bases the level of passenger rewards on the number of miles they fly. But by trawling through its warehouse and matching passenger revenue to frequent fryers, Delta found a relatively low correlation between passengers flying the most miles and those generating the most revenue. Armed with that information, Delta decided its efforts would be more lucrative if focused on its highest value flyers, and less on customers who fly most frequently.

Clearly most, if not all, of the examples in the book are NCR customers, but one plus point of that is the sheer scale of the warehousing systems under examination. We learn that "Wal-Mart maintains 65 weeks of detailed data on every sale, at every cash register, at each of more than 3,000 stores, for every product, in every size, shape and colour". That amounts to several hundred terabytes of data under management and is though to be the second largest commercial data warehouse in the world.

However, the customer-focused subject matter of the book and its comprehensiveness is let down in one way. Its publisher, Prentice Hall, needs to learn a thing or two about customer targeting. The binding and illustrations make the book look more like a dry, academic text and not one suitable for the audience Swift clearly had in mind - managers at all corporate levels who need to understand the potential of customer warehousing.