Profitable Customer Management: A Study in Retail Banking

The increasing focus of relationship marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) studies on issues of customer profitability has led to the emergence of an area of research on profitable customer management. Nevertheless, there is a notable lack of empirical research examining the current practices of firms specifically with regard to the profitable management of customer relationships according to the approaches suggested in theory. This thesis fills this research gap by exploring profitable customer management in the retail banking sector. Several topics are covered, including marketing metrics and accountability; challenges in the implementation of profitable customer management approaches in practice; analytic versus heuristic (‘rule of thumb’) decision making; and the modification of costly customer behavior in order to increase customer profitability, customer lifetime value (CLV), and customer equity, i.e. the financial value of the customer base. The thesis critically reviews the concept of customer equity and proposes a Customer Equity Scorecard, providing a starting point for a constructive dialog between marketing and finance concerning the development of appropriate metrics to measure marketing outcomes. Since customer management and measurement issues go hand in hand, profitable customer management is contingent on both marketing management skills and financial measurement skills. A clear gap between marketing theory and practice regarding profitable customer management is also identified. The findings show that key customer management aspects that have been proposed within the literature on profitable customer management for many years, are not being actively applied by the banks included in the research. Instead, several areas of customer management decision making are found to be influenced by heuristics. This dilemma for marketing accountability is addressed by emphasizing that CLV and customer equity, which are aggregate metrics, only provide certain indications regarding the relative value of customers and the approximate value of the customer base (or groups of customers), respectively. The value created by marketing manifests itself in the effect of marketing actions on customer perceptions, behavior, and ultimately the components of CLV, namely revenues, costs, risk, and retention, as well as additional components of customer equity, such as customer acquisition. The thesis also points out that although costs are a crucial component of CLV, they have largely been neglected in prior CRM research. Cost-cutting has often been viewed negatively in customer-focused marketing literature on service quality and customer profitability, but the case studies in this thesis demonstrate that reduced costs do not necessarily have to lead to lower service quality, customer retention, and customer-related revenues. Consequently, this thesis provides an expanded foundation upon which marketers can stake their claim for accountability. By focusing on the range of drivers and all of the components of CLV and customer equity, marketing has the potential to provide specific evidence concerning how various activities have affected the drivers and components of CLV within different groups of customers, and the implications for customer equity on a customer base level.

Elliptic slot antenna for broadband wireless communications

This paper presents the design of a broadband antenna suitable for wireless communications operating over the frequency range of 3.1-10.6 GHz. Parametric studies on the effect of stub and elliptic slot have been carried out to arrive at optimum dimensions to achieve enhanced bandwidth of the proposed antenna. An experimental antenna has been designed and tested to validate the proposed design. Measured return loss characteristics have been compared against the simulation results. Simulated radiation patterns at 3.1 GHz, 6.85 GHz and 10.6 GHz have also been presented in this paper.

Banking psychographics: an Indian empirical study

India has been witnessing an economic boom which fuelling a huge growth in the financial sector especially the banks. The spending power and consumerism has been increasing along with the growth in GDP. The numbers of banks are around 3000 (data according to Reserve Bank of India). With a population base of close to 1.1 billion and a diverse culture that has been dictating the mindset and lifestyle of the population, it has been a challenge for the banks to understand the customer better and hence a the need of the hour is a proper psychographic study of retail banking customers.

Advances in base- and mobile-station aided cooperative wireless communications : An overview

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of research interest in cooperative wireless communications in both academia and industry. This article presents a simple overview of the pivotal topics in both mobile station (MS)- and base station (BS)- assisted cooperation in the context of cellular radio systems. Owing to the ever-increasing amount of literature in this particular field, this article is by no means exhaustive, but is intended to serve as a roadmap by assembling a representative sample of recent results and to stimulate further research. The emphasis is initially on relay-base cooperation, relying on network coding, followed by the design of cross-layer cooperative protocols conceived for MS cooperation and the concept of coalition network element (CNE)-assisted BS cooperation. Then, a range of complexity and backhaul traffic reduction techniques that have been proposed for BS cooperation are reviewed. A more detailed discussion is provided in the context of MS cooperation concerning the pros and cons of dispensing with high-complexity, power-hungry channel estimation. Finally, generalized design guidelines, conceived for cooperative wireless communications, are presented.

Fixed-lag blind equalization and sequence estimation in digital communications systems using sequential importance sampling

We present methods for fixed-lag smoothing using Sequential Importance sampling (SIS) on a discrete non-linear, non-Gaussian state space system with unknown parameters. Our particular application is in the field of digital communication systems. Each input data point is taken from a finite set of symbols. We represent transmission media as a fixed filter with a finite impulse response (FIR), hence a discrete state-space system is formed. Conventional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques such as the Gibbs sampler are unsuitable for this task because they can only perform processing on a batch of data. Data arrives sequentially, so it would seem sensible to process it in this way. In addition, many communication systems are interactive, so there is a maximum level of latency that can be tolerated before a symbol is decoded. We will demonstrate this method by simulation and compare its performance to existing techniques.