Topological Data Analysis of Time Series Data for B2B Customer Relationship Management
This work introduces TDA as a viable tool for quantitative marketing practitioners, addressing the incremental application of an existing method to a new domain (B2B CRM) with potential benefits for loyalty analysis.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding customer loyalty in B2B customer relationship management by applying Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to time series data, showing that it helps analysts better understand their customer base and identify opportunities, and can be used as a clustering method to increase predictive model accuracy for loyalty scoring.
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a recent approach to analyze data sets from the perspective of their topological structure. Its use for time series data has been limited to the field of financial time series primarily and as a method for feature generation in machine learning applications. In this work, TDA is presented as a technique to gain additional understanding of the customers' loyalty for business-to-business customer relationship management. Increasing loyalty and strengthening relationships with key accounts remain an active topic of discussion both for researchers and managers. Using two public and two proprietary data sets of commercial data, this research shows that the technique enables analysts to better understand their customer base and identify prospective opportunities. In addition, the approach can be used as a clustering method to increase the accuracy of a predictive model for loyalty scoring. This work thus seeks to introduce TDA as a viable tool for data analysis to the quantitate marketing practitioner.