Customer relationship management (CRM) is the mechanisms and technologies used to manage the interactions between a company and its customers. Database marketers were the early adopters of CRM software, in order to automate the process of customer interaction.

CRM implementations can be characterized as being

• operational and/or
• analytical.

Operational CRM includes sales force automation and call centers. Most global companies have implemented such systems. The goaö of operational CRM is to provide a single view and point of contact for each customer.

Analytical CRM uses data mining techniques to uncover customer intelligence that serves to better understand and serve the customer.

However, although many of the DM techniques have been around more than ten years for scientific applications, only in the past few years have we witnessed the emergence of solutions that consolidate multiple DM techniques in a single software offering. One of the most significant barriers to the explosion of the use of knowledge discovery in organizations relates to the fact that still today implementing a data mining model is still considered an art.