Transforming the Customer Journey: Improving Firm Actions to Drive Customer Behavior

Transforming the Customer Journey: Improving Firm Actions to Drive Customer Behavior

Abstract:
We propose a novel, transformer-based approach to model and improve customer journeys. Customer journeys are sequences of touchpoints between firms and customers, potentially ending in a purchase. Much of the previous literature has modeled the sequence of all touchpoints, without distinguishing between contacts initiated by the firm versus the customer. Our model jointly predicts the type and timing of the next customer action as well as the likelihood of conversion, using the entire prior sequence of firm- and customer-initiated touchpoints. We use data from a large Dutch insurance company to demonstrate that the model accurately predicts the type and timing of customer actions and the likelihood of conversion, outperforming commonly used benchmarks. We find that the impact of company actions on conversion vary strongly across different customer journeys and over time within the same journey.

More information on Prof. Dr. Dennis Fok can be found here.