An intelligent cloud-based customer relationship management system to determine flexible pricing for customer retention

Due to fierce competition in the market, effective customer relationship management approach is necessary in order to gain competitive advantage. In general, customers can be divided into different categories based on their purchase behavior, historical ordering pattern and frequency of purchase. Customized sales and promotion on specific items can be offered so as to increase sales. However, due to the lack of a flexible pricing strategy, companies can only offer the same sales and marketing strategies to all customers. Valuable customers may be neglected which results in the loss of customer loyalty and even the loss of sales orders. In this paper, an intelligent cloud-based customer relationship management system (ICRMS) is designed to formulating the sales and marketing strategies on flexible pricing in the supply chain. The system integrates cloud technology and the fuzzy logic approach to manage sales and order data on the Internet, and to determine the discount price of products respectively. By conducting a pilot study in an advanced manufacturing technology company, the results show that the service quality can be enhanced while customer satisfaction is increased.