A new approach to customer asset value assessment with interval numbers

Customer asset value assessment is an important task in customer relationship management, which can be modelled as a multiple attribute decision-making problem. The research on this topic is not common when the customers' asset information is not expressed with the exactly numeric forms, for example, in the form of intervals. This paper proposes an approach to the customer asset value assessment problem with customers' asset information being interval numbers. In the approach, the decision matrix in the form of intervals is normalised firstly. Then, the attribute weights are determined by solving a goal programming model proposed. Based on the weights determined, the weighted distances between the alternatives (i.e. the customers) and the positive ideal alternative and the negative ideal one are calculated. The customers can be ranked based on the relative distances between the alternatives and the negative ideal alternative. An example is used to illustrate the proposed approach.