When customer relationship management meets data mining

Customer relationship management (CRM) has been a hot button issue for businesses for quite some time now. About $5.7 billion worth of CRM software was sold in 2005, and this figure is expected to rise by a compound annual growth rate of about 11.2% until 2010 (Mertz, Pang, & Dharmasthira, 2006). CRM can be viewed as the business process in which customer equity (i.e., aggregate lifetime value of a firm’s existing and potential customers) is continuously created, enhanced, and managed by interacting with customers through multiple channels (Kumar & Reinhartz, 2004).