Bringing data mining to customer relationship management of every company

The current trend in customer relationship management (CRM) is to be analytical. Customer transactions are being recorded by more and more businesses and there is a great demand to use this data efficiently. Data mining (DM), the science of finding new, interesting patterns and relationships in huge amounts of data is a proven solution to analytical CRM. However, the commercial DM tools for analytical CRM have some weaknesses that hinders their wider use. The most important ones are the pricing, the need for data mining expertise of the user and the limited number of methods and algorithms they offer. Especially the costs related to tools and expertise limit the use of DM in small and middle-sized enterprises (SMEs). Louhi data mining tool developed at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is designed to overcome these limitations to enable broader use of data mining methods in various customer related businesses also including SMEs. The tool was piloted during year 2003 with end-users in real-world CRM cases