A Systematic Review of Consumer Behaviour Prediction Studies

Due to the importance of Customer behaviour prediction, it is necessary to have a systematic review of previous studies on this subject. To this effect, this paper therefore provides a systematic review of Customer behaviours prediction studies with a focus on components of customer relationship management, methods and datasets. In order to provide a comprehensive literature review and a classification scheme for articles on this subject 74 customer behaviour prediction papers in over 25 journals and several conference proceedings were considered between the periods of 1999- 2014. Two hundred and thirty articles were identified and reviewed for their direct relevance to predicting customer behaviour out of which 74 were subsequently selected, reviewed and classified appropriately. The findings show that the literature on predicting customer behaviour is ongoing and is of most importance to organisation. It was observed that most studies investigated customer retention prediction and organizational dataset were mostly used for the prediction as compared to other form of dataset. Also, comparing the statistical method to data mining in predicting customer behaviour, it was discovered through this review that data mining is mostly used for prediction. On the other hand, Artificial Neural Network is the most commonly used data mining method for predicting customer behaviour. The review was able to identify the limitations of the current research on the subject matter and identify future research opportunities in customer behaviour prediction