Customer Business Projection
Using time-series methods, Total Customer Analytics projects
each customer's business with you over the next three years. This
assumes a business-as-usual approach, and you can use this information
in a number of ways. You might want to design interventions for
customers at risk of attrition. You can also use the
business-as-usual forecast to change your strategy and tactics.
Lastly, you can evaluate how many new customers are needed to offset any
projected business declines. This data is appended to your
customer file that is returned to you.
Specific Customer Business Projection Method
We use a multi-step method to forecast future business by customer:
- Estimate the customer purchase cycle.
Using invoice data, we calculate the days between invoices for each
customer to compute the purchase cycle. The purchase cycle is
used to group past purchases into the cycle and subsequent purchases
are forecast into the different cycles.
- Project future purchases. Using
optimally-scaled exponential smoothing factors, we forecast each
customer's business over the forecast purchase cycle. For
customers who haven't purchased recently, our method projects no
future purchases.
- Convert future purchases into months.
Since the purchase cycle can span multiple months and years, we
smooth the purchases over time into months.
- Summarize data by year. The actual and
forecast data is then summarized by year and appended to the
customer master file.