Developing and Analyzing the Customer Pyramid via Data Envelopment Analysis

As customers are the most important asset of companies, they must manage relationships with customers and consider it as an opportunity. Prioritizing the customers is one of the most important marketing activities that must be conducted to build an appropriate relationship with customers. Appropriate classification and ranking are impressive in companies’ interaction with their customers. Ranking and classifying customers into different categories takes place to improve marketing performance. Appropriate classification of customers leads the organizations to the desire target markets. To analyze the customer's value, some approaches were used in the past that the most important methods are based on regression and artificial intelligence techniques. Previous methods which have been introduced can hardly be applied in real world situation because they are very complex and they need complex mathematical knowledge and software. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper proposed an application of data envelopment analysis (DEA), slack based measure (SBM) model and Super SBM model to measure the value of customers. Applying the above mentioned models, the customers were evaluated, classified and ranked and the customers who were most useful to the company were identified. In the end, customer pyramid was constructed by the customer values.