Spotting the ‘elusive’ prospect customer: Exploratory study of a web-powered customer relationship management framework

Abstract

Research on how Web-Mining (WM) optimizes marketing, is sparse. Especially absent, is research on WM usefulness for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The purpose of this research, is to propose a Web Mining-enabled knowledge acquisition framework for analytical CRM. An exploratory study consisting of eleven in-depth interviews with marketing scholars and practitioners revealed that, WM methods and techniques - currently available to practitioners - are well-suited for identifying the profile of web prospects according to their browsing behaviour and to classify them into homogeneous groups. Besides, the nascent technologies regarding opinion mining, sentiment analysis or natural language parsing, and which underlie WM, seem sufficient to acquire knowledge pertaining to attitudinal and other more psychometrically-based characteristics about web prospects. Such tools enable to better understand the so-often termed ‘elusive’ prospects, by crafting fine-grained online marketing strategies to acquire those wouldbe customers. The authors discuss the managerial implications that derive from these findings.