Section: New Results

Customer Purchase Signatures: a New Model in Grocery Retail Context

Participants : Clément Gautrais, Peggy Cellier [Lis] , Thomas Guyet, René Quiniou, Alexandre Termier.

In the retail context, there is an increasing need for understanding individual customer behavior in order to personalize marketing actions. We propose the novel concept of customer signature, that identifies a set of important products that the customer refills regularly. Both the set of products and the refilling time periods give new insights on the customer behavior. Our approach is inspired by methods from the domain of sequence segmentation, thus benefiting from efficient exact and approximate algorithms. Experiments on a real massive retail dataset show the interest of the signatures for understanding individual customers (under submission to PAKDD 2017 conference).

This new model is used to detect and explain customer defection in a grocery retail context from the evolution of each customer basket content. It therefore provides actionable knowledge for the retailer at an individual scale. In addition, this model is able to identify customers that are likely to defect in the future months [16].