Towards Customers Retention: Identifying Both Purchase-interest Customers And Quality Websites

In E-Commerce, customer retention is one of the most important topics, which is vitally important to enterprise's development and success. From the point of view of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), customer is the most important enterprise's resource. Enterprise must build long-term relationship with its customers to enhance its competition ability and realize its sustained development.To gain the customer's long-term satisfaction, increase customer loyalty and retain customer effectively, enterprise must have the ability to understand deeply the customer's behavior, preferences and requirement. Web mining, which develops from Data mining, is just one of the most prevailing techniques that can provide this ability for enterprise. It can discover valuable and actionable information from a huge amount of Web data to assist in enterprise's decision-making, such as acquiring new customer and retaining old customer.In this paper, we study the following two issues of customer retention by using Web mining technique.1. Identifying visitors who have purchase interest. There is a large number of visitors to an E-Commerce website everyday. But their aims are quite different. If we don't distinguish them when we analyze their visit patterns, we will get the imprecise results that will not help enterprise for decision-making. To solve this problem, we present an approach to identify visitors who have purchase interest. Our basic idea is that we make use of the information contained in Web-Logs and a classifier consisting of 9 attributes to classify the visitor at a certain website into three different groups, that is, visitors who have purchase interest, those who have no purchase interest, and the network robots.2. Website quality evaluation. With the population of E-Commerce, website is used not only initially as a "window" of an enterprise that customer interact with, but also gradually as an important environment for trading merchandise. A website with good quality is convenient for customer to obtain information and purchase merchandise, and consequently it helps enterprise to increase customer loyalty and achieve customer retention. So the quality of website is of importance. However, how does an enterprise know the quality of its website and the situation compared with its competitors? We present a website quality evaluation method to solve this problem. The method basically consists of the following steps: (a) Specifying object to be evaluated; (b) Selecting some attributes for evaluating; (c) Getting the value of all attributes; (d) Defining evaluation functions and evaluating the attributes; and (e) Yielding the global evaluation by aggregating all the evaluations of attribute.We build a prototype according to our presented methods. The experimental results show that our methods are effective and feasible.