How Do They Behave on the Web? An Exploratory Study of Mining the Web for Analytical Customer Relationship Management

10.7903/ijecs.1398

Myriam Ertz；Raoul Graf

Web Mining ； Knowledge Management ； Customer Relationship Management ； Web Data ； Consumer Behavior ； Data Mining ； Marketing ； E-Commerce

International Journal of Electronic Commerce Studies

6卷2期（2015 / 12 / 01）

289 - 304

英文

Web Mining (WM) remains a relatively unknown technology. However, if used appropriately, it can be of great value to the identification of existing customers' behaviours online. The recent technical advances in the field of WM enhance tremendously the analytical Customer Relationship Management (aCRM), still usually related to a simple transactional function. This study follows an exploratory approach to assess whether WM fulfills, alone, all three objectives of the second theme of Xu and Walton's adapted aCRM framework for customer knowledge acquisition, namely the identification of existing web customers' behaviour. It also investigates to what extent WM should be used in conjunction with traditional marketing research to optimize CRM, and hence marketing, in a web context. In-depth, semi-structured interviews reveal that WM is very well suited to understand existing web customers' transactional web behaviour(s) (i.e. navigation patterns; amount of purchases by week, month, and region; and cross-selling and up-selling opportunities). Nevertheless, WM does not do well in understanding less obvious, underlying dimensions of customer behaviour, including how existing customers develop satisfaction, loyalty, defection and attachment on the web. WM still needs to be complemented with traditional marketing research in order to reach these more difficult but essential aCRM objectives.

1. Adams, N.M.(2009).Adams, Perspectives on data-mining.International Journal of Marketing Research,52(1),11-19.
2. Bazsalicza, M.,Naim, P.(2001).Data mining pourle web: Profiling, filtrage collaboratif, personnalisation client.Paris:Eyrolles.
3. Cooley, R.,Mobasher, B.,Srivastava, J.(1997).Web-Mining: information and pattern discovery on the world wide web.Proceedings of the International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence,Newport Beach, CA:
4. Kerin, R.A.,Varadarajan, P.R.,Peterson, R.A.(1992).First-Mover advantage: A synthesis, conceptual framework, and research propositions.Journal of Marketing,56(4),33-52.
5. Kimball, R.,Ross, M.(2002).The data warehouse toolkit: The completeguide to dimensional modeling second edition.New York:Wiley.
6. Kosala, R.,Blockeel, H.(2000).Web mining research: a survey.SIGKDD Explorations – Newsletter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data-Mining,2(1),1-15.
7. Liu, B.(Ed.)(2011).Web data mining: Exploring hyperlinks, contents, and usage data (data-centric systems and applications).Chicago, IL:Springer.
8. Malhotra, N.K.(2010).Marketing research: An applied orientation.Upper Saddle River, NJ:Prentice-Hall.
9. Mihai, I.(2009).Web-Mining in e-commerce.Oradea, Romania:Annals of theUniversity of Oradea, Economic Science Series.
10. Miller, F.R.,Miller, L.E.(2007).That’s customer focus!: The overworked and underappreciated manager’s guide to creating a customer-focused organization.Booksurge.
11. Rafea, A.,El-Beltagy, S.(2006).El-Beltagy, Data mining center of excellenceorganizational web mining.Cairo, Egypt:First annual technical reportTR/COE_WM.
12. Ranjan, J.,Bhatnagar, V.(2011).Role of knowledge management and analytical CRM in business data mining based framework.The Learning Organization,18(2),131-148.
13. Romano, N.C.,Fjermestad, J.(2003).Electronic commerce customer relationship management: a research agenda.Information Technology and Management,4(2-3),233-258.
14. Romano, N.C.,Fjermestad, J.(2002).Electronic commerce customerrelationship management: an assessment of research.International Journal of Electronic Commerce,6(2),61-113.
15. Sivaramakrishnan, J.,Balakrishnan, V.(2009).Web mining functions in an academic search application.Informatica Economica,13(3),132-139.
16. Srinivasan, S.,Anderson, R.,Kishore, P.(1998).Customer loyalty inE-Commerce: A exploration of its antecedents and consequences.Journal of Retailing,78(1),41-50.
17. Srivastava, J.,Cooley, R.,Deshpande, M.,Tan, P.N.(1999).Web usage mining: discovery and applications of usage patterns from web data.SIGKDD Explorations,1(2),1-12.
18. Van Hippel, E..Generation and evaluation of novel product concepts via analysis of experienced users.Massachusetts:MarketingScience Institute, Cambridge.
19. van Wel, L.,Royakkers, L.(2004).Ethical issues in web data mining.Ethics an Information Technology,6(2),129-140.
20. Wahlberg, O.,Strandberg, C.,Sundberg, H.,Sandberg, K.W.(2009).Trends, topics and under-researched areas in CRM research.International Journal of Public Information Systems,5(3),191-208.
21. A. Wright, Mining the web for feelings, not facts. The New-York Times, August 23, 2009.
22. Xu, M.,Walton, J.(2005).Gaining customer knowledge through analytical CRM.Industrial Management and Data Systems,105(7),955-971.
23. Zhang, Q.,Segall, R.S.(2008).web mining: A survey of current research, techniques, and software.International Journal of Information Technology and Decision-Making,7(4),683-720.