Product recommendation incorporating the consideration of product performance and customer service factors
ISSN: 0368-492X
Article publication date: 22 November 2017
Issue publication date: 29 November 2017
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a novel framework for recommending desirable products to active customers with the consideration of not only their preferences but also the products’ quality performances and their e-retailers’ service performances under e-commerce.
Design/methodology/approach
A framework in support of the product recommendation is presented. Three modules are involved in the framework, i.e. data collection and preference analysis module, hybrid recommendation module and recommendation generation module. First, preferences of different types of customers are inferred through analysis of their behavioral data and then a paradigm is adopted based on cased-based reasoning to generate candidate recommendation products. Further, recommendation lists for different types of customers are obtained through measurement of the quality and service performances concerning each candidate recommendation product.
Findings
To illustrate the performance of the presented framework, a simulation study comparing the approach developed based on the framework and the traditional approach is conducted. The experiment results show that the developed approach outperformed the traditional approach in term of average rank score. This means that incorporating the consideration of product performance and customer service factors can play an important role in product recommendations.
Originality/value
The presented framework can overcome the defect that low conversion rate of recommended products to actually purchased ones suffered by the traditional approach. In addition, the use of the presented framework can not only help customers to obtain desirable products and save searching time but also supervise and urge e-retailers to pay more attention to the quality and service performances.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Conflict of interests. The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.
The authors thank the reviewers for their careful reading and providing some pertinent suggestions. This work was partly supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Project Nos. 71501063 and 71571039), the Key Research Base Project of University Humanities & Social Sciences, Henan, China (Project No. 2015-JD-04), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Henan Provincial Colleges and Universities (Project No. 2014SBS003), the Project of Education Ministry Humanities & Social Sciences, Henan, China (Project No. 2018-ZZJH-111) and the 111 Project (Project No. B16009).
Citation
Li, Y.-H., Fan, Z.-P. and Qiao, G.-H. (2017), "Product recommendation incorporating the consideration of product performance and customer service factors", Kybernetes, Vol. 46 No. 10, pp. 1753-1776. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-03-2017-0096
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited