Multi-criteria decision approaches for technical and managerial issues in customer relationship management

Abstract

Within the new business culture today, the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) is emphasized both in the academic and business arenas. The concept of mass marketing is being replaced by one-to-one marketing and personalized services. To this end, it is essential for firms to implement CRM systems by means of such as outsourcing, commercial packages, and/or in-house development for some functions. In any case, various technical and/or managerial issues are doomed to arise, and must be addressed. In this thesis, we address three issues on technical and managerial problems that can be encountered in CRM implementation with multi-criteria decision approaches. First, a method for eliciting customer preference information from navigation behavior on the web and for finally recommending the most appropriate product was presented. The identification and recommendation of such products are all based on the use of each customer’s real-time web usage behavior which includes the activities such as just viewing, basket placement, and purchasing of products without forcing a customer to explicitly express his or her preference information for particular products. Further, the products are usually characterized by multiple aspects including price, which is considered most important. The multiple aspects of products lead to the consideration of the multiple criteria decision making approach in which products are evaluated under multiple conflicting criteria. Information on the web usage behavior for the products determines the ordinal relations among the products which are evaluated by multiple criteria. Thus, the problem eventually results in the identification of weights attached to the multiple criteria under multi-dimensional preference space constructed by ordinal relations among the products. The derived weights are then used for the prioritization of products that are not included in the navigation behavior due to the facts such as time pressure, cog...