[English Version] 
[Mathe Home]
[LS NAM]
Increasing economic competition urges most companies to improve their marketing, sales, and
customer support. Many firms are trying to create one-to-one relationships with their
customers. They aim to make it easier for the customer to do business with them rather with a
competitor and to estimate the lifetime value of each customer. The change in focus from
broad market segments to individual customers requires learning from the data from and about
the customers instead of simply gathering it or not gathering it at all. This is the goal of
database marketing. Its essence is knowledge discovery in databases, i.e. "the non-trivial
process of identifiying valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns in
data".
Data on customers is often exact, e.g. a customers age , the number of people which he or her
shares the household with or the salary. On the other side there are vague concepts that lack in
unambiquity, exactness or context independency like the customer's favourite dish, the state of
his marriage or professional qualification. Furthermore, even exact data is often not necessary
for an anlysis; a mail order business is not interested whether a customer earns 3,567 or 3,612
EURO a month but if his or her income is high or rather medium. An appropriate means for
reflect such uncertain and vague concepts is fuzzy logic which was founded by Lotfi Zadeh in
1965.
We were particularly interested in generating fuzzy rules from data and have written related articles,
which were accepted for presentation at some international conferences. My work on this field
is part of a project which a software house and an insurence broker are involved in. The
project investigates methods for gaining new customers more effectively and cross selling.
One of the most important goals in marketing is to realize the highest profit by applying appropriate means to acquire customers, such as mailings, letters, telephone calls, offers and presentatons. In the past this business was the realm of men and women who "had a nose" for selling goods or services. More recently it has attracted also computer scientists, who support marketers by software tools for planning and organizing marketing campaigns or by more sophisticated methods like decision support systems or intelligent broker agents.
This study has been motivated while we are involved in improving the commercial software tool AkquiSys. The graphic user interface of AkquiSys is shown below.
Publications to this and other fields of research can be found at the papers & preprints page.
Co-operation: FOR/MAT Technology GmbH
Contact: Prof. Dr. rer. nat.
habil. Ludwig J. Cromme
Dipl.-Math.
techn. Klaus Weber,
Dipl.-Math.
Stephan Würll