Title: Handling the inconsistency in ranking customers via several multi-criteria ranking methods

Authors: Yossi Hadad; Baruch Keren; Dima Alberg

Addresses: SCE – Shamoon College of Engineering, Beer Sheva, Israel ' SCE – Shamoon College of Engineering, Beer Sheva, Israel ' SCE – Shamoon College of Engineering, Beer Sheva, Israel

Abstract: There are many multi-criteria methods for ranking and classifying customers, but it is difficult to determine which, if any, ranking method is the best. In this paper, we propose an application that uses several ranking methods, is easy to implement and retrieves ranking criteria values from the customer relationship management system. Because each ranking method can yield a different ranking for each customer, we suggest giving each ranking method the same weight so that each customer's final ranking will be determined by the average of the ranks obtained from all the ranking methods. A unique result of the proposed application is the possibility of calculating the variance of the rank for each customer and the confidence intervals. The applicability of the proposed method was demonstrated in a real case study with nine ranking methods; IPython codes of five of those methods are available herein.

Keywords: marketing intelligence; customer relationship management; CRM; multiple criteria decision analysis; MCDA; data envelopment analyses; DEAs; analytic hierarchy process; AHP; shortest distance ranking methods.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBFMI.2024.135719

International Journal of Business Forecasting and Marketing Intelligence, 2024 Vol.9 No.1, pp.50 - 79

Received: 21 Feb 2023
Accepted: 28 Feb 2023
Published online: 03 Jan 2024 *

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