CORALS: Who Are My Potential New Customers? Tapping into the Wisdom of Customers' Decisions

Abstract

Identifying and recommending potential new customers for local businesses are crucial to the survival and success of local businesses. A key component to identifying the right customers is to understand the decision-making process of choosing a business over the others. However, modeling this process is an extremely challenging task as a decision is influenced by multiple factors. These factors include but are not limited to an individual's taste or preference, the location accessibility of a business, and the reputation of a business from social media. Most of the recommender systems lack the power to integrate multiple factors together and are hardly extensible to accommodate new incoming factors. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework, CORALS, which considers the personal preferences of different customers, the geographical influence, and the reputation of local businesses in the customer recommendation task. To evaluate the proposed model, we conduct a series of experiments to extensively compare with 12 state-of-the-art methods using two real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that CORALS outperforms all these baselines by a significant margin in most scenarios. In addition to identifying potential new customers, we also break down the analysis for different types of businesses to evaluate the impact of various factors that may affect customers' decisions. This information, in return, provides a great resource for local businesses to adjust their advertising strategies and business services to attract more prospective customers.