Ontologies, CRM, Data Mining: How to integrate?
M. ottgtroy · 2003
Customer Relationship Management ( C M ) systems rely in providing better information services to a population of end users/customers. A typical service of a C M solution is to provide to a consumer access to a FAQ system to get advice on commonly occurring product problems. The CRM solution also typically supports direct communication with users, such as email communication, allowing the users to make requests for information via emails and, in some cases, receiving automatically generated responses to those emails. Providing information to users implies in access, and integration of diverse and distributed sources of information. On the other hand, the information collected from theses sources and from user's interactions should be of great value if integrated in a data mining process to maintain the current users, prospect new ones, and reaching some competitive advantage among competitors. Ontologies have been used to provide semantic integration and reasoning in decision support systems and knowledge management activities. The ontology captures the intrinsic conceptual structure of a domain. For any given domain, its ontology forms the heart of the knowledge representation. Our goal in this paper is to analyse some of the main opportunities to build a system that leverages the semantic content of ontologies in order to improve services provided by CRM solutions, and use this rich information environment to apply knowledge discovery techniques to reach a competitive advantage. Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 29, © 2003 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517