Maintaining customer profiles in an e-commerce environment

  • Authors:

  • Felix Ntawanga;André P. Calitz;Lynette Barnard

  • Affiliations:

  • Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth;Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth;Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 annual research conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on IT research in developing countries: riding the wave of technology
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Recent studies have indicated an increase in customer profiling techniques used by e-commerce businesses. E-commerce businesses are creating, maintaining and utilising customer profiles to assist in personalisation. Personalisation can help improve customers' satisfaction levels, purchasing behaviour, loyalty and subsequently improve sales. The continuously changing customer needs and preferences pose a challenge to e-commerce businesses on how to maintain and update individual customer profiles to reflect any changes in customers' needs and preferences. This research set out to investigate how a dynamic customer profile for on-line customers can be updated and maintained, taking into consideration individual web visitors' activities. The research designed and implemented a decision model that analysed on-line customers' activities during interaction sessions and determined whether to update customers' profiles or not. Evaluation results indicated that the model was able to analyse the on-line customers' activities from a log file and successfully updated the customers' profiles, based on the customer activities undertaken during the interaction session.