NEC Corporation claims it has developed a Customer Profile Estimation Technology that automatically estimates detailed customer profiles on individual customers, including their interests and preferences to a high level of precision, without the involvement of marketing experts.
Based on NEC’s relationship mining technologies, the newly-developed technology estimates detailed and hard-to-obtain profiles on individual customers completely automatically and to a high degree of precision from basic profile information that is relatively easy to obtain, such as age and gender, combined with purchase histories.
NEC says it has verified the effectiveness of the technology using public data. As a result, NEC has confirmed that an analysis that would take conventional experts three months to complete can be carried out in three days, and to a degree of precision that surpasses those experts.
“With this technology, we can respond to lifestyles that change from moment to moment, quickly discover true individualized needs that may have been overlooked, and devise appropriate measures. In addition to estimating detailed customer profiles, the technology can also be applied to estimating product attributes,” said Akio Yamada, General Manager, Data Science Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation.
Through NEC’s unique relationship mining technologies, detailed profile information for each customer can be estimated by simply inputting their basic profile information and purchase histories. As the fully automated process completely eliminates tasks such as manual product labeling, detailed profiles on each individual customer can be estimated in a short time, thereby cutting three months down to three days.
An artificial intelligence (AI) component references product purchase histories to produce a hypothetical detailed profile for each customer. This is interconnected with another AI that references questionnaire results provided by a subset of customers to verify the accuracy of the hypotheses. This cycle of hypothesis generation, verification and feedback is repeated.
The use of AI allows objective detailed profile estimation untainted by the subjective views of an analyst, says NEC. By repeating the cycle many times at high speed, the estimation of detailed customer profiles to a degree of precision that surpasses the analysis results of an expert is achieved.