Relational Learning for Customer Relationship Management

Customer modeling is a critical component of customer rel ationship management (CRM). Successful customer modeling requires a holistic view and the consolidation of all customer information a vail ble to the business, which is typically stored in a relational data b se. With this understanding, customer modeling in CRM can be viewed as a spec ial case of the relational learning problem, a recent extension of the traditional machine learning problem that aims to model the re lational interdependencies within a database containing multiple in terlinked tables. We establish in this paper the connection between relat ional learning and CRM analysis through detailed discussion of the tasks of customer classification and product recommendation, supported by exam ples of empirical results on seven real-world CRM data sets. We demonstrate that relational learning approaches can be valuable tools for a v a iety of CRM modeling tasks and discuss limitations and CRM specific exte nsions of these general relational learning approaches.