Introducing Busy Customer Portfolio Using Hidden Markov Model

Due to the effective role of Markov models in customer relationship management (CRM), there is a lack of comprehensive literature review which contains all related literatures. In this paper the focus is on academic databases to find all the articles that had been published in 2011 and earlier. One hundred articles were identified and reviewed to find direct relevance for applying Markov models in CRM. Forty four articles were selected and categorized on two major subclasses: articles which had used Markov chain models (MCM) in CRM and those which had applied hidden Markov models (HMM) in CRM. Findings of this paper indicate that applying HMM in CRM is approximately rare, since it contains 27.2% of the total number of published articles. To complete investigation a two-step framework has been suggested for using HMM in busy customer portfolio management. It is for the first time that two important concepts (busy customer and HMM) are used to achieve a common goal. Also the model parameters have been estimated in order to analyze a real firm s data.