Customer Service Skills Knowledge Base and Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Data Mining?
Main Page
• Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook
• Perfect Phrases For Customer Service
•Free customer service tips and techniques and customer service scripts
Customer Service Discussion List
Customer Service Library Online
• Most Recently Added Customer Service Resources
• Most Popular/Viewed Customer Service Resources
There's no question that the more you know about your customers, the better positioned you are to meet their needs and offer better customer service. In the old days, companies would conduct focus groups, or solicit customer feedback, since the limits on learning about customers were related to limits on the amounts and types of data a company could reasonably use.
Welcome to the millenium. Now we have very complex tools to collect, analyze and make use of information about customers. Modern CRM suites and software allow us to integrate all kinds of information. The collecting, analysis, and use of this information about customers is called data mining.
If you've seen ads (amazon.com is one company that uses data mining) that are customized to your previous buying habits or interests, you've seen data mining in action.
Data mining provides the information about customers to customize their buying experiences. Of course, you can collect volumes of information now, but the problem has now shifted from collecting data to making sense of the data, which is the current challenge.
Robert Bacal is the author of two books on customer service: Perfect Phrases for Customer Service: Hundreds of Tools, Techniques, and Scripts for Handling Any Situation, and Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook. Most of the questions and answers in the Customer Service Knowledgebase (which you are reading now) is based on the material in these books.