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Chapter 67
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9562-7.ch067
Customer Relationship
Management and Data Mining:
A Classifcation Decision Tree
to Predict Customer Purchasing
Behavior in Global Market
ABSTRACT
In the global market of today, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) plays a fundamental role
in market-oriented companies to understand customer behaviors, achieve and maintain a long-term
relationship with them, and maximize the customer value. Moreover, the digital revolution has made
information easy and fairly inexpensive to capture. Thus, companies have stored a large amount of data
about their current and potential customers. However, this data is often raw and meaningless. Within
the CRM framework, Data Mining (DM) is a very popular tool for extracting useful information from
this data and for predicting customer behaviors in order to make proftable marketing decisions. This
research aims to demonstrate the classifcation decision tree as one of the main computational data
mining models able to forecast accurate marketing performance within global organizations. Particular
attention is paid to the identifcation of the best marketing activities to which frms should concentrate
their future marketing investments. The criteria is based on the loss functions that confrm the accuracy
of this model.
Niccolò Gordini
University of Milan – Bicocca, Italy
Valerio Veglio
University of Milan – Bicocca, Italy