Challenge: Create a Customer Relationship Management System

Problem statement

The customer relationship management (CRM) system of a company is responsible for managing customer data, tracking interactions, and supporting sales and marketing efforts. However, the current data management approach of a company lacks efficiency, resulting in sluggish performance and ineffective customer analysis. The system currently relies on various data structures such as dictionaries, lists, sets, and queues. To improve overall system performance and enhance data handling capabilities, we need to optimize the usage of these data structures and employ suitable techniques.

Tasks

According to the statement above, we will focus on optimizing data handling processes for the CRM system. The following tasks outline the key areas for improvement:

• Data structure assessment:

  • Originally, the CRM system has a Customer class containing id, name, and email attributes. It has a Interaction class as well, including customer_id, interaction_type, and timestamp to represent individual interactions between the CRM system and customers.

  • Implement the dataclasses, evaluate the usage of dictionaries, lists, sets, and queues within the CRM system, and Identify areas where tuples can be utilized to represent structured data, ensuring data integrity and ease of access.

  • Utitlize defaultdict to simplify handling missing or non-existent customer data.

  • Use counters for tracking customer interactions or analyzing the frequency of specific events.

• Efficient data access and manipulation:

  • Assess the suitability of using lists or queues for managing customer interactions and streamlining data processing using queue and PriorityQueue.

• Streamlined data storage and retrieval:

  • Utilize sets to handle unique customer attributes or preferences effectively.

  • Create a customer dictionary to optimize dictionary key-value access.

• Enhanced data processing and analysis:

  • Assess the impact of inefficient data handling on CRM processes, such as lead scoring or sales forecasting.

By addressing these tasks, we aim to enhance the data handling efficiency of our CRM system, leading to improved performance, streamlined operations, and enhanced insights for sales and marketing teams.

Note: You may practice writing your code in the playground below before moving to its solution lesson.