• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.53-64
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• 2021

Upselling is often a critical factor in revenue generation for businesses in the tourism and travel industry. Utilizing passenger data from a major international airline company, we develop the PAX (Passenger, Airline, eXternal) model to predict passengers that are most likely to accept an upgrade offer from economy to premium. Formulating the problem as an extremely unbalanced, cost-sensitive, supervised binary classification, we predict if a customer will take an upgrade offer. We use a feature vector created from the historical data of 3 million passenger records from 2017 to 2019, in which passengers received approximately 635,000 upgrade offers worth more than $422,000,000 U.S. dollars. The model has an F1-score of 0.75, outperforming the airline's current rule-based approach. Findings have several practical applications, including identifying promising customers for upselling and minimizing the number of indiscriminate emails sent to customers. Accurately identifying the few customers who will react positively to upgrade offers is of paramount importance given the airline 'industry's razor-thin margins. Research results have significant real-world impacts because there is the potential to improve targeted upselling to customers in the airline and related industries.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.752-770
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to incorporate telemarketing processes to improve telemarketing performance. For this application, we have attempted to mix the model of machine learning to extract potential customers with personalisation techniques to derive recommended products from actual contact. Most of traditional recommendation systems were mainly in ways such as collaborative filtering, which predicts items with a high likelihood of future purchase, based on existing purchase transactions or preferences for products. But, under these systems, new users or items added to the system do not have sufficient information, and generally cause problems such as a cold start that can not obtain satisfactory recommendation items. Also, indiscriminate telemarketing attempts can backfire as they increase the dissatisfaction and fatigue of customers who do not want to be contacted. To this purpose, this study presented a multi-purpose hybrid recommendation algorithm to achieve two goals: to select customers with high possibility of contact, and to recommend products to selected customers. In addition, we used subscription data from telemarketing agency that handles insurance products to derive realistic applicability of the proposed recommendation system. Our proposed recommendation system would certainly solve the cold start and scarcity problem of existing recommendation algorithm by using contents information such as customer master information and telemarketing history. Also. the model could show excellent performance not only in terms of overall performance but also in terms of the recommendation success rate of the unpopular product.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.19-24
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• 2018

Purpose - Drone delivery is expected to revolutionize the supply chain industry. This paper aims to introduce a collaborative parcel delivery problem by truck and drone (hereinafter called "TDRP") and propose a novel heuristic method to solve the problem. Research design, data, and methodology - To show the effectiveness of collaborative delivery by truck and drone, we generate a toy problem composed of 9 customers and the speed of drone is assumed to be two times faster than truck. We compared the delivery completion times by 'truck only' case and 'truck and drone' case by solving the optimization problem respectively. Results - We provide literature reviews for truck and drone routing problem for collaborative delivery and propose a novel and original heuristic method to solve the problem with numerical example. By numerical example, collaborative delivery is expected to reduce delivery completion time by 12~33% than 'truck only' case. Conclusions - In this paper, we introduce the TDRP in order for collaborative delivery to be effective and propose a novel and original heuristic method to solve the problem. The results of research will be help to develop effective heuristic solution and optimize the parcel delivery by using drone.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.213-225
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• 2010

Data mining has empowered the managers who are charge of the tasks in their company to present personalized and differentiated marketing programs to their customers with the rapid growth of information technology. Most studies on customer' response have focused on predicting whether they would respond or not for their marketing promotion as marketing managers have been eager to identify who would respond to their marketing promotion. So many studies utilizing data mining have tried to resolve the binary decision problems such as bankruptcy prediction, network intrusion detection, and fraud detection in credit card usages. The prediction of customer's response has been studied with similar methods mentioned above because the prediction of customer's response is a kind of dichotomous decision problem. In addition, a number of competitive data mining techniques such as neural networks, SVM(support vector machine), decision trees, logit, and genetic algorithms have been applied to the prediction of customer's response for marketing promotion. The marketing managers also have tried to classify their customers with quantitative measures such as recency, frequency, and monetary acquired from their transaction database. The measures mean that their customers came to purchase in recent or old days, how frequent in a period, and how much they spent once. Using segmented customers we proposed an approach that could enable to differentiate customers in the same rating among the segmented customers. Our approach employed support vector regression to forecast the purchase amount of customers for each customer rating. Our study used the sample that included 41,924 customers extracted from DMEF04 Data Set, who purchased at least once in the last two years. We classified customers from first rating to fifth rating based on the purchase amount after giving a marketing promotion. Here, we divided customers into first rating who has a large amount of purchase and fifth rating who are non-respondents for the promotion. Our proposed model forecasted the purchase amount of the customers in the same rating and the marketing managers could make a differentiated and personalized marketing program for each customer even though they were belong to the same rating. In addition, we proposed more efficient learning method by separating the learning samples. We employed two learning methods to compare the performance of proposed learning method with general learning method for SVRs. LMW (Learning Method using Whole data for purchasing customers) is a general learning method for forecasting the purchase amount of customers. And we proposed a method, LMS (Learning Method using Separated data for classification purchasing customers), that makes four different SVR models for each class of customers. To evaluate the performance of models, we calculated MAE (Mean Absolute Error) and MAPE (Mean Absolute Percent Error) for each model to predict the purchase amount of customers. In LMW, the overall performance was 0.670 MAPE and the best performance showed 0.327 MAPE. Generally, the performances of the proposed LMS model were analyzed as more superior compared to the performance of the LMW model. In LMS, we found that the best performance was 0.275 MAPE. The performance of LMS was higher than LMW in each class of customers. After comparing the performance of our proposed method LMS to LMW, our proposed model had more significant performance for forecasting the purchase amount of customers in each class. In addition, our approach will be useful for marketing managers when they need to customers for their promotion. Even if customers were belonging to same class, marketing managers could offer customers a differentiated and personalized marketing promotion.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.15-35
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• 2002

Data mining has received a lot of attention from practitioners. That is partly because it allows company to extract a set of useful knowledge about customers from database, thereby retaining current customers and magneting potential customers. This logic is especially essential in the field of credit card industry, where just 5% increase of number of customers is hewn to cause 120% increase in profit. The problem is how to retain current customers and even make them more loyal to company. However, previous studies lacked proposing extensive strategies of reducing the churning rate. In this sense, this study attempts to suggest such strategies by applying neural network, logistic regression, and C5.0 techniques to credit card data. We used a real data set of four years from 1997 to 2000, which were gathered from a credit card company. Experimental results revealed that our approach could yield robust strategies for retaining customers by reducing the churning rate.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.67-76
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• 2018

Purpose - With the worldwide aging problem and the development of globalization, customers prefer to seek affordable medical services with the higher quality overseas. This new trend has urged some destination countries to improve their services for the more competitive advantages over other countries. Literature research indicate that medical quality and cost may be the key factors influencing global patients' decisions. In the international environment, however, medical tourism destinations are selected due to cultural similarity between the hosting country and the customers' own country. The more similarity perceived between the two countries leads foreign patients to choose the considering country as the destination for medical tourism. However, little research has been conducted on this topic. Thus, we empirically investigate how cultural similarity influences Chinese medical customers' choice of the destinations. We also consider the factors related to medical competency and travel attribute which might affect customers' decisions along with some moderating roles of disease types. Research design, data, and methodology - We proposed a research model in order to confirm the relations among different variables of cultural similarity, medical competency, travel attractiveness, disease types, and destination choice. The questionnaire survey is processed in the more economically developed regions of China such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Jiangsu. Conditional logit regression is applied to analyze the data of 881. Results - Results indicate that cultural similarity is the important predictor of Chinese customers' decision to select a medical country. However, the effects of cultural similarity vary according to the disease types. We also find that medical competency and travel attractiveness influence their decisions with the moderating role of disease types. Conclusions - Cultural similarity is the important factor that influences Chinese potential medical tourists' decisions to select a destination. Marketing managers should consider the effects of cultural similarity when developing strategies for attracting Chinese medical tourists. Since medical competency and travel attractiveness are still the critical key elements for them to evaluate the destination countries, it is necessary to continuously improve medical service quality and facilities. The results also recommend that medical managers should sharpen their marketing strategies by segmenting Chinese potential customers in terms of disease types.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.98-103
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• 2006

In this research, the single machine capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem with sequence- dependent setup costs and setup times (CLSPSD) is considered. This problem is the extension of capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem (CLSP) with an additional assumption on sequence-dependent setup costs and setup times. The objective of the problem is minimizing the sum of production costs, inventory holding costs and setup costs satisfying customers' demands. It is known that the CLSPSD is NP-hard. In this paper, the MIP formulation is presented. To handle the problem more efficiently, a conceptual model is suggested, and one of the well-known meta-heuristics, the simulated annealing approach is applied. To illustrate the performance of this approach, various instances are tested and the results of this algorithm are compared with those of the CLPEX. Computational results show that this approach generates optimal or nearly optimal solutions.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.19 no.37
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• pp.263-269
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• 1996

The cost and customer service level of a logistics system depend primarily on the system design of the physical supply system and physical distribution system. The study presents the mathematical model and a huristic solution method of a combined location - vehicle routing problem(LVRP). In LVRP the objective is to determine the number and location of the distribution centers, the allocation of customers to distribution centers, and the vehicle delivery routes, so as to minimize the logistics total cost and satisfy the customer.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.16 no.28
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• pp.195-202
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• 1993

This paper considers the vehicle routing problem taking account of not only delivery but pick-up at the same time. A mathematical formulation is presented for finding the route which satisfies all the demands of customers and enables picking up most containers without exceeding the capacity of the vehicle. A table comparing traveling distance and the pick-up amount is provided by using heuristic method, which will be of help to the decision makers.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.81-99
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• 2010

Lately, in consumers' markets the number of new items is rapidly increasing at an overwhelming rate while consumers have limited access to information about those new products in making a sensible, well-informed purchase. Therefore, item providers and customers need a system which recommends right items to right customers. Also, whenever new items are released, for instance, the recommender system specializing in new items can help item providers locate and identify potential customers. Currently, new items are being added to an existing system without being specially noted to consumers, making it difficult for consumers to identify and evaluate new products introduced in the markets. Most of previous approaches for recommender systems have to rely on the usage history of customers. For new items, this content-based (CB) approach is simply not available for the system to recommend those new items to potential consumers. Although collaborative filtering (CF) approach is not directly applicable to solve the new item problem, it would be a good idea to use the basic principle of CF which identifies similar customers, i,e. neighbors, and recommend items to those customers who have liked the similar items in the past. This research aims to suggest a hybrid recommendation procedure based on the preference boundary of target customer. We suggest the hybrid recommendation procedure using the preference boundary in the feature space for recommending new items only. The basic principle is that if a new item belongs within the preference boundary of a target customer, then it is evaluated to be preferred by the customer. Customers' preferences and characteristics of items including new items are represented in a feature space, and the scope or boundary of the target customer's preference is extended to those of neighbors'. The new item recommendation procedure consists of three steps. The first step is analyzing the profile of items, which are represented as k-dimensional feature values. The second step is to determine the representative point of the target customer's preference boundary, the centroid, based on a personal information set. To determine the centroid of preference boundary of a target customer, three algorithms are developed in this research: one is using the centroid of a target customer only (TC), the other is using centroid of a (dummy) big target customer that is composed of a target customer and his/her neighbors (BC), and another is using centroids of a target customer and his/her neighbors (NC). The third step is to determine the range of the preference boundary, the radius. The suggested algorithm Is using the average distance (AD) between the centroid and all purchased items. We test whether the CF-based approach to determine the centroid of the preference boundary improves the recommendation quality or not. For this purpose, we develop two hybrid algorithms, BC and NC, which use neighbors when deciding centroid of the preference boundary. To test the validity of hybrid algorithms, BC and NC, we developed CB-algorithm, TC, which uses target customers only. We measured effectiveness scores of suggested algorithms and compared them through a series of experiments with a set of real mobile image transaction data. We spilt the period between 1st June 2004 and 31st July and the period between 1st August and 31st August 2004 as a training set and a test set, respectively. The training set Is used to make the preference boundary, and the test set is used to evaluate the performance of the suggested hybrid recommendation procedure. The main aim of this research Is to compare the hybrid recommendation algorithm with the CB algorithm. To evaluate the performance of each algorithm, we compare the purchased new item list in test period with the recommended item list which is recommended by suggested algorithms. So we employ the evaluation metric to hit the ratio for evaluating our algorithms. The hit ratio is defined as the ratio of the hit set size to the recommended set size. The hit set size means the number of success of recommendations in our experiment, and the test set size means the number of purchased items during the test period. Experimental test result shows the hit ratio of BC and NC is bigger than that of TC. This means using neighbors Is more effective to recommend new items. That is hybrid algorithm using CF is more effective when recommending to consumers new items than the algorithm using only CB. The reason of the smaller hit ratio of BC than that of NC is that BC is defined as a dummy or virtual customer who purchased all items of target customers' and neighbors'. That is centroid of BC often shifts from that of TC, so it tends to reflect skewed characters of target customer. So the recommendation algorithm using NC shows the best hit ratio, because NC has sufficient information about target customers and their neighbors without damaging the information about the target customers.