Customers Classification according to the Grey-Based Decision-Making Approach and Its Application to Bank Queue Systems

In business competitive environment, customers play an important role. Companies attempt to satisfy their current customers and attract new ones. Customers classification can create a motivation between customers. Customers with high priority can use some advantages that companies assign to them. On the other hand, customers with low priority attempt to get higher priority in order to use these advantages. This motivation can cause a win to win relationship between customers and companies. For classifying, the needed information will be available in customer relationship management (CRM) database. In this paper at first, the grey relational analysis (GRA) method is applied to rank customers. Then, customers are classified into two different classes according to their ranking: multi-class and two-class. Finally, we consider a queue with three different types: no priority, two-priority and multi-priority. In priority models, the high-priority customers have a non-preemptive priority over low-priority customers. For each model, performance measures are calculated and the results are compared. Also, a case study performed at the bank is presented to show this procedure.