Customer Regain Management in E-business -processes and Measures-

Recent studies show, that due to the rapid technological progress, the growing globalisation of markets and the increasing availability of information long-term and valuable relationships became more important than the permanent acquisition of new customers. As a consequence of this, the focus shifted from a transaction-oriented economy to a relationship-based economy. Concepts like customer relationship management, which involves the attracting and keeping of valuable customers and eliminating ‘invaluable’, are frequently discussed. But regardless its importance, so far only little attention has been paid on how to regain already ‘lost’ customers. Recent research often only concentrates on building and maintaining individualized relationships, lacking of integrated management processes and measures particular for regain management. Therefore current article proposes a concept for customer regain management in e-business. Based on a theoretical foundation a process framework and measures for identifying, selecting and reactivating terminated relationships are explained. The concept of web usage mining is introduced and options for supporting customer regain management in the context of an online shop are illustrated.