Customer program consists of a group of research scientists specialized in customer research and analytics. The mission of this group is to know more about the customer using available data and predict customer behavior in their entire customer life cycle so that marketers can take the required actions to acquire, nurture, and retain customers. This group has been a key contributor to enrich Rakuten’s CustomerDNA by envisaging inferred attributes, attributes like lifestyle, marital status, income level, etc. which are not known from customer data, but can be inferred based on their usage pattern, buying behavior, browsing history, etc. Other notable initiatives include devising an AI based credit scoring model that will let lenders like Rakuten Bank to give loans to a larger audience with reduced stress of non-payment, building models that can be used for customer prospecting (using AIris, which is a lookalike model for target prospecting) and banner optimization using PITARI (which is solution for customer targeting based on profile, A/B testing, and delivering personalized ad content).
