Report the Dark Side of Customer Analytics free essay sample

REPORT: THE DARK SIDE OF CUSTOMER ANALYTICS JAIRO PALACIOS DANIEL TIRADO This case is about an insurance company that has a dark side in their organizational culture and manage their customer’s data in an irresponsible way in order to succeed. We will write a custom essay sample on Report: the Dark Side of Customer Analytics or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page PROFESSOR JORGE ANDRES ALVARADO UNIVERSIDAD DE LA SABANA MARKETING INFORMATION SYSTEMS BOGOTA D. C AMLI 2011 1. How can these companies handle the customer data responsibly? Source: http://www. webdesignbognorregis. The use of data has taken an important place in the business life and in the recent years has become in one of the biggest competitive advantage. Who doesn’t want to have a successful business? Everybody wants, but what are you doing to have it? Are you making good decisions?. â€Å"The dark side of customer analytics† by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris, show us an insurance firm called IFA that bought loyalty card data from a grocery chain but IFA had a dark side in their organizational culture that accepted unethical strategies in order to succeed. The irresponsible use of data is not a mechanism to: achieve goals, have better relationships with our customers, competitive advantage or others factors that we consider vital to the growth of the company, opposite, what the case teaches us is a lesson of life that if we have an ethical perform, managing responsible our customers data, we can maximize it and that will allow us to have strong relationships with them, creating value and also we will be able to make a difference in the market that will generate competitive advantages. First of all, we believe that manage customer data in a responsible way requires an organizational culture strongly established with an ethic politics. If we don’t have a clear culture, each of the company members is going to have their own standards, habits and values that will create a huge hurdle in the data life cycle because we wouldn’t know how can be handle the information of our customers among the organization and how we are going to make decisions based in the customer data. On the other hand, companies can handle and control their customer data, communicating timely unregulated fact committed by a company member or a third person that affects the interests of the customers; aside if we create perceived value giving confidence from our part to our customers they will generate data with less problems. The technology boom has created new and interesting ways to study and keep customers, so companies use databases to identify prospects, decide which customers should receive a given supply, strengthen customer loyalty and boost purchases of lost customers, making companies succeed, these databases must be handled in the most ethical ways to not create problems of invasion of privacy and lack of confidentiality of information, as the IFA did. Construct a table with the pros and cons of different possible decisions. The different possible decisions that we figured out, about how to handle a costumer’s data in a responsibly way are: Organizational Culture| Communication of an unregulated fact| Pros| Cons| Pros| Cons| Efficiency work| Managers lack of capacity to implement the Organizational Culture. | Cost minimization. | Stress. | Ethical? s politics| Lack of employee training. | Better control over the company. | Appeal to third party institutions. | The first possible decision is that the company should has a strongly established Organizational Culture because it allows the company to get a Code of Business Conduct with ethical politics that share the same values and goals with the employees. Also it helps to work in harmony, making that the employees feel motivated by the company, that finally, the employee will work more efficiency. However, it has a negative way if the manger and/or the employees, don’t know how to apply the politics, values and strategies, hat the company desire, it happened for the lack of the training or skills that the mangers and/or the employees should have. The Second possible decision is Communication of an unregulated fact, that it helps to minimize cost, because you are going to know what’s going on in the company, before it happen, so you will have more control over the levels of your company. On the other hand whit a good Communication of an unregulated fact, you are going to prevent the stress that could appear in the controlling process.