TARGETING CUSTOMERS: A FUZZY CLASSIFICATION APPROACH

Nowadays, marketing serves the purpose of maximizing customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer equity, which is the sum of the lifetime values of the company’s customers. But, CLV calculation encounters some difficulties which limit the usage of this technique. Nonetheless, companies looking for methods to know how to calculate their customers’ CLV. In this paper, fuzzy classification rules were used to determine customers’ CLV and segment them based on recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) measures. Data required for applying this method gathered from a steel firm in Iran.