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-= CHAPTER I =-
INTRODUCTION
1. 1. Background
The service level needed to be studied will be based on the situation based
from a company that focused on the business regarding cable broadcast subscription.
To improve sales incomes, a company usually has several marketing divisions
and each of them has their own method for gaining the income. This ranges from
direct marketing, promotion, wholesale dealings, dealer partnership, and even multilevel marketing, which in this case by using subscribers to act as an agent to attract
other new possible subscription candidate.
However, because the continuous rapid growth in the competition between
other vendors, the service level affects greatly as one of important factors that helps
creates better strategies. Further management was needed to control the sales growth
because if left unchecked, this would affect the overall company performance.
One of the main examples here are the sales income, starting from the sales
officers until sales head department. Usually some sort of incentives schema are
implemented that heavily relies on how many customer each sales division can get.
The numbers of customers sales officer can get affects the incentive they can get, and
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this also affects heavily on higher position. Because of that, higher management has
to devise new strategies which one of the main factor is the statistic based on
customer demographic.
And this provides new challenges because customer profile has not being
explored, only by regular statistical reports. Any major reports that require
complicated calculations can affect the database performance, which also effects on
user’s daily tasks. And this request these days became much larger in medium,
quantity, and more often, especially because this affects on how quick any decision
making can be delivered.
Data mining as part of business intelligence process are processes that often
neglected because some company usually are content enough with data warehouse,
and even some more does not even have any implementation of any business
intelligence tools and heavily relies on external statistical reporting. Another staple is
that data mining requires advanced knowledge of users which are more dependent on
Information Technology department, not including the cost needed to invest on any
kind of data mining technologies.
Right now, there are many data mining tools that has been created for any
kind of study, although this usually relies on unique sample data that are much
complicated than just mere population data. And there are many that are free for
usage, or at least giving trial period of usage. This study will try to see several of
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known data mining tools that could give informative description that can contribute to
any kind of decision making.
1. 2. Statement of Problems
These days the service level on each aspects, starting from customer relation
up until the company performance quality has created demands for more accurate
reporting and even analysis studies performed to help the management creates a
decision that help further the sales performance for the company.
However, because some of the request hasn’t been managed properly, this
would impacts on the IT service that has to fulfill every needs of the service level
reporting request. There’s also another problem which caused by the variety of the
request itself and the dependent knowledge from specific requirements that cause
further delay in delivering the results needed.
Therefore, this study will try to discover new information based on the
clustering methods which is now concentrated on analyzing the social aspects from
customers of sales divisions which hopefully will help with future decision making
based on these habits.
1. 3. Goal of Study
The main purpose of this research is to explore important information in
customer database using data mining techniques especially clustering methods so that
customer profile can be known and used for future strategic planning that affects the
company’s service level. This also might provide any alternative potentialthat would
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affect the quality of service level that also affects the company’s benefit based from
the result of this study.
1. 4. Benefit of Study
Even though there are many studies of Business Intelligence that has been
implemented especially over the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) itself,
there are still many areas that can be explored further. Especially upon the service
level performance and analysis needed to help improve the quality itself.
Therefore, by conducting further research upon this matter could help not only
discovering the pattern within the service level itself, but also predicts the paths
needed based on the analysis using tools from Business Intelligence itself.