Modeling Customer Behavior with Analytical Profiles

Contemporary companies try to build customer relationship management systems based on the customer social relations and behavioral patterns. This is in correspondence with the current trend in marketing that is to move from broadcast marketing operation to a one-to-one marketing. The key issue in this activity is predicting to which products or services a particular customer was likely to respond to. In order to build customer relationship management systems, companies have to learn to understand their customer in the broader social context. The key hypothesis in this approach is that the predictors of behavior in the future are customers behavior patterns in the past. This is a form of human behavioral modeling. The individual customer behavior patterns can be used to build an analytical customer profile. This will be described in section “Introduction” and “Customer profiling”. Based on this profile a company might target a specific customer with a personalized message. In section “Critical examples” the authors will focus in particular on the importance of the customer social relations, that reflects referrals influence on the marketing response. In the end in section “Market of analytical profiles” they will discuss the potential business models related to market exchange of analytical profiles.