When Behavioral Targeting and CRM meet

I’m currently working on a targeted advertising project for a telco company. A new solution for personalizing web site interactions, based on the fusion of customer and web behavioral data, has been developed. I would like to share ideas about this project and get your opinion about it.

Nowadays, customer data (CRM) and web behaviors are not employed to enrich each other. This is far from optimal because, huge leverage effects can be derived from each of these data domains. Currently, CRM or simply customer data which is available in most large companies is not used to enrich and enhance web user interactions and vice-versa web behavioral user data is not used to enrich customer profiles. As a result, one end up with a limited customer profile, which enables only limited personalization of customer interactions.

There are two types of web site visitors: identified and anonymous. For identified visitors, both CRM and web data exist. For anonymous visitors, only web data are available. Usually, the majority of website visitors are anonymous. The principle behind the developed solution is to build an extended customer profile by merging CRM data about the customer and his web behavior. A subset of these visitors is used to train the model and, using this model, a score is computed for any other identified visitors.

With this extended customer profile (web behavior + CRM data), a series of recommendations as well as web interest affinities (e.g. sports, technology, product type A, product type B) can be generated for customers with repeated web site visits. I have used data mining techniques such as decision trees to infer recommendations. I have been able to obtain up to 390% increase in identified visitors click-through rate.

Up to now, the solution provides a unique score for each visitor. The next step would be to have N scores for the N different products. It would then be possible to have a prioritization among the products (the higher the score, the higher the priority).

Feel free to give your opinion about this project. Also, if you’re working on a similar solution, don’t hesitate to comment this post and share your ideas.

Comments