An analytical journey towards big data

Abstract

Companies are realising the potential value of data to gain insight into their customers and the power of analytics to guide decision-making. While many firms have invested in data-intensive customer relationship management (CRM) systems to develop long-term relationships with customers, the advent of ‘big data’ has led to even more challenges as companies struggle to both develop analytical capabilities for existing data and integrate information from these new data sources into their CRM decisions. In this paper, we employ a case study approach to identify management challenges in creating a data-driven organisation that has aspirations to incorporate big data into decision-making. The firm is an international franchiser in the hospitality industry with a centralised CRM team and well-known brands. Management challenges are identified through elite interviews and are associated with a customer dimension, CRM process dimension, organisational alignment dimension, and CRM outputs dimension. An experiment with sentiment analysis of customer social media data is performed to illustrate the unique barriers to integrating unstructured data as one form of big data into the firm’s current decision-making paradigm.