eCommerce

Aim of the "Custimer Value Estimation (CuVE)" project is to provide companies with a service that realizes an individual price adjustment by taking into account the risk-adjusted customer potential. In order to realize this, existing approaches for a monetary evaluation of customer values, like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), are extended.

For a measurement of customer value potentials, the so-called customer value is the prime source. Generally, a customer value constitutes the added value which a company receives through relationship to a customer. Companies need analytical and prospective methods for a value-oriented business management to achieve an efficient allocation of scarce resources. In practice, a comprehensive customer evaluation often fails due to non-monetary variables which can be hardly, or only through prohibitive high costs, determined. Therefore, - supported by the permanentely increasing IT application - one-dimensional, analytic, monetary approaches like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) are increasingly applied in commercial applications. As a dynamic and future-oriented approach, CLV reflects the (expected) present value from future incoming and outgoing payments of a customer thereby allowing companies a source-related allocation of discounted customer-specific cashflows for the total period of the relationship. An operationalization of CLV is currently complicated by information about future cashflow which is not, or only to a limited extend available and by customer-individual risks that go along with it. It is this research project's aim to close this gap and to provide companies with a method which allows an integrated evaluation of customer values and risks.