Real-time database analysis: Customer knowledge as a value-determining factor in e-commerce

Web and e-mail are producing massive amounts of data, but only a few organisations are able to recognise their customers within these mountains of bits and bytes. Even fewer companies are really using the knowledge they can collect from in- and outbound e-mail and log files from the web. The reasons for this lie not only in the quantity of incoming data, but also in the fact that web and e-mail are often not yet integrated with other media and operational systems of the organisation. The unprecedented opportunities offered by web and e-mail in real-time interaction with customers are thus not used although, for many Internet players, actionable customer knowledge is their only value determining factor. Real-time database analysis can help in this.