For the sake of gaining competitive advantages, it is important to evaluate the satisfaction level of a product or service from the users’ perspective. This can be done by investigating the relationship among customer attributes (customer requirements) and design attributes (product configurations). However, such relationship would be highly non-linear in nature. In this regard, many approaches...

Many companies have recently been choosing information technology (IT) outsourcing in response to complicated information systems and various internal requirements. In order to monitor and maintain a high quality of IT outsourcing vendors’ services, it is necessary to develop a system to evaluate IT outsourcing customer satisfaction. The system can be used as a tool for choosing IT outsourcing ...

Analysing customers in groups is one of the most fundamental issues in Marketing. It helps companies sufficiently learn from their customers, and rationally design their marketing strategies. Given a customer database with n records (customers) and m attributes (one’s characteristics) stored, different approaches can be applied to automatically segment (cluster) records in divisions. In this pa...

We introduce a support vector decision tree method for customer targeting in the framework of large databases (database marketing). The goal is to provide a tool to identify the best customers based on historical data. Then this tool is used to forecast the best potential customers among a pool of prospects. We begin by recursively constructing a decision tree. Each decision consists of a linea...

In this paper, we examine a new data mining issue of mining association rules from customer databases and transaction databases. The problem is decomposed into two subproblems: identifying all the large itemsets from the transaction database and mining association rules from the customer database and the large itemsets identified. For the first subproblem, we propose an efficient algorithm to d...

Firms involved in international logistics must develop a system of service attributes that give them a way to be profitable and to satisfy customers’ needs at the same time. How customers trade-off these various attributes in forming satisfaction with competing international logistics providers has not been explored well in the literature. This study explores the ocean freight shipping sector t...

In today’s competitive business environment, more and more organizations move or extent their business online. Thus, there is an increasing need for organizations to build concrete online marketing strategies in order to engage with their customers. One basic step towards achieving the objectives related to online marketing is the segmentation of online customers, based on the customer data gat...

BACKGROUND Understanding customers has become an urgent topic for increasing competitiveness. The purpopse of the study was to develop a qualitative dynamic attribute value model which provides insight into the customers' value for healthcare institute managers by conducting the initial open-ended questionnaire survey to select participants purposefully. METHODS A total number of 427 question...