In today’s economic world, a major source of competitive advantage for businesses is given by their capability of knowing their customers - i.e. understanding their tastes and interests - in order to provide them with products and services that better match their needs.
Such a knowledge would be of course important for many B2C companies, since it would allow them not to miss any sale opportunity and to improve customer fidelization, but it would also be beneficial for customers given that their needs would be better satisfied.
At present, companies typically try to get to know their customers by monitoring their purchase history and then they recommend products/services by comparing such history with that of customers with similar tastes (recommender systems). However, besides frequently providing firms with vague customer profiles, this approach is often limited to those market segments with frequent online interactions between customers and firms, e.g. e-commerce stores. As such, it can be hardly applied to other sectors - like banking and insurance - where said interactions (and the resulting data) are quite scarce or even absent.
The objective of the project “DataSci4Tapoi” is to enhance and improve a software - called “Tapoi” - that, on the one hand, is able to provide firms with a more in-depth profile of each customer and, on the other, to extend such profiling activity also to some market segments (most notably, financial services) that, so far, have not been able to know their customers’ needs in detail.
The main idea is using activities on social media to understand a) what topics (for instance, music, sport, art, etc.) interest a customer the most and b) to detect the occurrence of so-called “Life Events”, i.e. those events - like a birth, a wedding, etc. - that usually trigger significant changes in purchase patterns.
A key enabling factor for Tapoi - that makes it also compliant with GDPR- is the social login, that is the practice of subscribing to an online service by making use of an account on a social network (Facebook, Twitter but also Google). In this way, each user is explicitly asked beforehand for her consent to grant access to her social activities. The latter will be the source of data from which Tapoi will build a profile/detect the occurrence of a Life Event.
