Customer Database

Nowadays, many companies are increasingly using databases to manage customer relationships to boost both sales and customer satisfaction. A well designed, secured and effective database can help the managers identify key trends and important information such as most profitable customers. A customer database plays a significant role in how companies/sellers keep controlling relationships with customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a core part of many small business' overall sales and marketing strategies.

In reality, even the smallest or largest companies spend lots of money annually on advertising to increase the amount of business they have and often they don't always target new customers, but the existing ones they have listed in their database. Keeping contact with customers is a good way to get repeat business and promote new products to the right people.

Obviously, the cheapest way to create the customer database is to make your own. However, it is not highly reliable and inapplicable with large companies.

Currently, Adidas is using the Oracle database software which ensures high quality, availability and performance. The software is: Oracle 13-Terabyte Data Warehouse. Here below are some other Oracle products and services Adidas applies to their customer database system.

Oracle Products & Services:

• Oracle Database

• Oracle Data Warehouse

• Oracle Partitioning

• Oracle Data Guard

Challenges

•• Enable global use of the company’s data warehouse system, which is built on SAP Business

Information Warehouse (BW) and Oracle relational database management system

(RDBMS) technology and contains information related to sales, marketing, and finance

•• Accommodate users at all management levels—from operative reporting to business performance management at the brand level

•• Ensure high availability of the data warehouse system for more than 1,500 users around the globe

•• Achieve worldwide integration of diverse source systems based on disparate technologies

•• Scale solution to manage more than 10 terabytes of data in a single database

Solutions

Ensured high availability and high performance of the data warehouse system as well as a standardized reporting view

•• Enabled global access to the data warehouse system for all lines of business in all geographical regions

•• Created an upstream Oracle Database to consolidate more than 30 non-SAP source systems in advance to ensure data quality and streamline data loading processes

•• Significantly reduced down time by implementing a disaster recovery architecture—with no unplanned downtime to date

•• Ensured high availability of the data warehouse system through replication enabled by

Oracle Data Guard

•• Enabled replication using the back-up system at a distance of 40 kilometres

••Used Oracle tools to improve performance by a factor of 100 for specialized queries

••Utilized Oracle

Some detailed information about customer stored in database:

Personal information

Name: arranged in alphabetical order from A-Z

Address; Nationality: USA, UK, VN, SUOMI, etc

Gender: Male/Female

Email address: easily to contact

Age: different segments such as children group: under 10, teenager group: 11-19, young adult group, and adult group.

Phone numbers: easily to contact

Occupation: sports player, coach, business person, student, worker

Buying behaviour

Purchases: shoes, clothes, sports equipments, perfume

Value: 5, 10 or €50

Amount: 1 pair of shoes or 2 shirts, pants, watches, 3 balls.

Product group purchased: Outdoor footwear, sports footwear, clothing, perfume, accessories.

Place of purchase: Helsinki, London, Espoo, Ho Chi Minh City, New York

Frequency of purchase: first-time customer, twice a week, etc

Life situation

Marital status: single, married

Hobbies: soccer, fishing, horse-racing, hanging out with friends, watching movies, etc

Customer feedback

Complaints, thanks, suggestions

Improvement actions: faster exchange defective product

Satisfaction data: rate of thanks or complaints feedback from the customer

Marketing actions

Regular newsletters: distribute new catalogue or leaflets, press

Campaigns: sponsorship, promotion for new products

Other contacts: via email, online customer store

The main goals of database marketing are to improve customer retention, cross-selling, up-selling and increase the rates of customer acquisition.

Basically, the purchasing information of customer is stored in the customer database of company. The product’s info, product’s purchasing rate, prospects, customer’s info, store’s info are all recorded carefully that would facilitate the process of analyzing the business market for the company.

Based on the figures stored in the database, the company have a general view of the tendency of buying company’s product. For instance, the company will see which product now is most preferable, which product’s amount is downward and since then company will set up some strategies to alter the product’s design, quality and boost the sales and raise the rates of customer acquisition.

For example, these days Tiger Woods, David Beckham or other famous sports players are some ubiquitous names heard many times through media thus customers would have paid their attention much more on them and when they enter the store they would be curious or interested with these sneakers, shirts, caps relevant to those famous players.

Another point is to increase the cross-sell, up-sell: In this matter, when a customer want to buy a basketball sneaker, he/she would also keeps eyes on the basketball headband, basketball kits and a ball so we can arrange these related items together and easy for the customer to buy.

Furthermore, the company notice the sneaker A is bought at high rate so they will design more sneaker A models like A+, A++, etc.

In fact, if the company wants to satisfy customer effectively they would exploit the customer database and make the long-run orientations.

By exploiting the customer’s information and market figures, the company would obtain an obvious overview of the market and catch up with the competitor’s activity then set the product’s price sensitively, develop the product’s quality, renew product’s models and enhance the customer’s care (customer service).

In addition, the company can send a gift or present to their loyal customer on special occasions like birthday, wedding, etc or implement different kinds of giveaways, customer’s benefits. Besides that, the company would set up strategies in effort of developing the customer bonds and maintaining customer relationship.