Extracting Customer Traces from CRMS: From Software to Process Models

Digitization has subjected nowadays business models to dramatic changes. This commitment to innovation forced even the giants of technology to shift and adapt their own business models (e.g. Google developed a rival social network for Facebook, and a cloud file-storage in order to propose an inexpensive version of Dropbox or One Drive, Microsoft developed an online version of Microsoft Office). Organization's agility must be embedded in companies' strategies to survive in a market where everything changes with a tremendous quickness. Customer journey mapping, embedded with business process management systems, can assure an improved digital customer experience. Design thinking, a methodology used by several high-tech companies like Apple and IBM, helps the designers to better understand customers' needs in order to provide desirable solutions. This paper proposes a new approach of generating customer traces from information systems like CRMS to improve customer experience. A germane fact is that companies should use state of the art methods and techniques to better understand customers' needs and Process Mining algorithms are among the most suitable solutions for this type of analysis. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.