Analysis of ordered categorical data to develop control charts for monitoring customer loyalty

In the highly competitive business environment of today, the cost to attract new customers is much higher than the cost required to maintain the existing ones. To keep the balance between the acquisition rate and defection rate through executing offensive and defensive marketing policies, it is required to have real time information using an efficient method to monitor customer loyalty. The relationship between customer loyalty and customer satisfaction should be kept in mind when one develops a method for loyalty monitoring. This paper presents several control charts classified in two groups based on the scale used to assess customer loyalty. In the first group of control charts, customer loyalty is considered as a binary random variable modeled by Bernoulli distribution whilst in the second group, an ordinal scale is considered to report loyalty level. Performance comparison of the proposed techniques using ARL criterion indicates that chi‐square and likelihood‐ratio control charts developed based on Pearson chi‐square statistic and ordinal logistic regression model respectively are able to rapidly detect the significant changes in loyalty behavior. To show how to apply the procedures and how to interpret their results, two illustrative synthetic cases are also explained. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.