VisCRM: A social network visual analytic tool to enhance customer relationship management

Abstract

As acquiring and retaining the most profitable customers are challenging tasks of service providers, various CRM tools are used to support these processes. Traditional CRM methods focus on various customer profitability models in different scenarios based on their past profit contribution. Social network analysis provides a natural way to understand the relationships between customers; however, this method has seldom been used in customer relationship management. In this paper, we propose a visual analytic tool - VisCRM to analyze the graph features in customer relationship network. Based on the Visual Analytics Mantra, users can get the properties of the whole network as well as the communication patterns of certain customer with VisCRM. Furthermore, customers' ranking scores could be got with different statistical algorithms, and a combined ranking score could also be got for each customer by setting different weights to these properties. After choosing a valuable customer, in order to get a deeper insight into customer's communication patterns, people can explore the features of certain customer's egocentric social network visually. To evaluate the effect of VisCRM, we will explore different mobile call networks in telecom services in the case studies. ©2008 IEEE.