Business-to-Business Customer Data Mining
What if your company sells to businesses not consumers? Some information will be the same, such as addresses and contact data. The demographic data will become firmographic data. Firmographics covers a company's revenue, number of employees, age, and two other areas:
Do not collect all this customer data at once. Spend the time learning about your customers through various contact points: friendly follow-up phone calls, surveys, contests, and one-on-one discussions. Be non-intrusive and remember the whole point of collecting this information is to better understand your customers and provide more complete solutions.
All of this collected data can be entered into a desktop database tool like MicroSoft Access, FoxPro, or FileMaker Pro. Most of these products can be purchased for a few hundred dollars and offer a simple solution for customer data mining.
Customer Data Mining Extraction
Now that you have compiled your customer data, it is time to sort and analyze. The critical point is to look at trends, patterns, and opportunities. Examples of data analysis include:
Be very alert of privacy laws and issues in using customer data. Business solutions such as customer data mining can and will be abused. Using information from your customers to contact them at dinnertime with solutions that just fatten profits is not good business. Gaining customer loyalty comes from the one-on-one interaction and listening to clients. Use your customer data wisely.