7. CONCLUSION
7.3 Future research
The next step in the client organization is repeating the same process with different clus-tering premises and objectives. Each of the process steps is now well documented and therefore the process can be easily repeated. The most interesting direction to cluster
customer organizations is to include the external features. This requires collecting and preparing the external data into use.
The number of contacts was seen correlating with a number of other features illustrating customer meaningfulness. It would be interesting to get deeper into investigating how the contacts illustrate the customer relationship with the client organization. The client organization has already started to improve contact related work. There are several in-teresting directions for investigation, i.e. investigating the effect of the contact’s position in their company on the organizational customer’s relationship with the client organiza-tion.t
The consistency of data management process in the client organization should be im-proved. To achieve it, it’s important to determine accurately the data needs in CRM and then investigating where the shortage of entering and handling this data lies and start improving and developing the processes more consistently from there on. This is a chal-lenging task especially in an IHE where the variety of customers and the customer rela-tionships is large.
When the data points are clustered, the actual learning of the machine can be tested.
For this, investigating solutions that support especially the CRM software solution used in an organization is recommended. I.e. Microsoft has a cloud-based machine learning platform Azure Machine Learning (AML) that offers several algorithms dedicated to ML purposes (Microsoft 2020). Salesforce has a similar service called Salesforce Einstein within Customer 260 Platform (Salesforce 2020).
The process conducted can be utilized in another organization too. As in this study the process was designed and carried out in a single organization, it would be useful to test it additionally in other organizations. The process conducted can best be utilized in IHE as the customers, organizational functions and goals are probably very close to each other in every organization in this field. Generally studies about CRM in IHEs and utilizing information technologies in this field are good and valued research topics.
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APPENDIX A: INFORMAL REFERENCES
Manager of CRM & Analytics, informal conversation 17.4.2020.