An Application of Support Vector Machines to Customer Loyalty Classification of Korean Retailing Company Using R Language

Purpose Customer Loyalty is the most important factor of customer relationship management (CRM). Especially in retailing industry, where customers have many options of where to spend their money. Classifying loyal customers through customers' data can help retailing companies build more efficient marketing strategies and gain competitive advantages. This study aims to construct classification models of distinguishing the loyal customers within a Korean retailing company using data mining techniques with R language. Design/methodology/approach In order to classify retailing customers, we used combination of support vector machines (SVMs) and other classification algorithms of machine learning (ML) with the support of recursive feature elimination (RFE). In particular, we first clean the dataset to remove outlier and impute the missing value. Then we used a RFE framework for electing most significant predictors. Finally, we construct models with classification algorithms, tune the best parameters and compare the performances among them. Findings The results reveal that ML classification techniques can work well with CRM data in Korean retailing industry. Moreover, customer loyalty is impacted by not only unique factor such as net promoter score but also other purchase habits such as expensive goods preferring or multi-branch visiting and so on. We also prove that with retailing customer's dataset the model constructed by SVMs algorithm has given better performance than others. We expect that the models in this study can be used by other retailing companies to classify their customers, then they can focus on giving services to these potential vip group. We also hope that the results of this ML algorithm using R language could be useful to other researchers for selecting appropriate ML algorithms.