BPM for supporting customer relationship and profit decision

Purpose – As a response to increasing global market competition, companies in various industries tend to identify and manage customer relationship to increase profit performance. Companies commit more resources to identify their VIP customers and retain them by all means. The purpose of this paper is to develop a customer relationship management (CRM) business process management (BPM) model to identify airline customers with different degree of relationship and profit potential, and select the highly profitable customers for developing retention strategy and processes, and convert the less profitable into profitable corporate accounts. Design/methodology/approach – This study innovatively apply the well-known techniques including CRM and relationship marketing models, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP), and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) in the BPM research. This novel approach analyzes longer term customer profit and value potential, and prioritizes corporate accounts as the basis for setting appropriate customer service levels and improving the CRM process. This hybrid model is able to capitalize on the benefits of these methods and offset their deficiencies. Most importantly, it can be customized to various industries without complex modification. Findings – This study uses data of an airline company to validate feasibility of the proposed CRM BPM model. The results indicate that this model is able to classify the customers based on various criteria and sub-criteria, thus allowing companies to introduce appropriate service levels to deal with different categories of customers, and improve CRM process so as to maximize customer profit and value potential. Practical implications – This CRM BPM model and analysis provide managers extensive customer knowledge, more analytical and fact-based decision-making support, and a stronger focus on return on investment in sales and marketing. Knowing the profit and value potential generated by individual corporate customer makes it easier to establish the link between the CRM and the profit outcome. This model also benefits the organization and its stakeholders by allocating more resources to the targeted customer relationships that are profitable or valuable, and makes marketing more accountable in its marketing programs. Originality/value – This study makes the first move to innovatively apply the well-known techniques including CRM and relationship marketing models, FAHP, and TOPSIS in the BPM research.