Patent Document ID: 8660882
Application ID: 12837758
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer-implemented method to optimize joint multi-channel configuration for a retailer to maximize both profit and customer satisfaction in retail industry, comprising: integrating a plurality of data sources comprising: channel information, transaction record, merchandise data, membership record, market survey data and demographic data; generating, from the integrated data sources, a customer preference matrix C k , representing a preference of a k th customer segment having at least one customer, of a plurality of customer segments, for a j th merchandise category from j mathematical natural and ordinal distributed merchandise categories, in an i th channel of a plurality of i mathematical natural and ordinal distributed channel types comprising at least two of: a brick and mortar channel, an internet channel, and a catalog channel; generating, by a hardware processor, a mathematic expression of customer satisfaction H i as a function of: a number of merchandise for the i th channel represented as I i , a relative price level for the i th channel represented as w i , and a service level for the i th channel represented as S i using a mathematical equation of form H i ⁡ ( l i , w i , S i ) = f HI ⁡ ( l i ⁡ [ j ] ) × f HP ⁡ ( w i ⁡ [ j ] ) × f HS ⁡ ( S i ) ∑ i = 1 N ⁢ ( f HI ⁡ ( I i ⁡ [ j ] ) × f HP ⁡ ( w i ⁡ [ j ] ) × f HS ⁡ ( S i ) ) wherein, I i [j] represents the number of merchandise of the j th merchandise category in the i th channel, w i [j] represents the relative price level of the j th merchandise category in the i th channel, f HI is a first increasing function of customer satisfaction to merchandise diversity, f HP is a decreasing function of customer satisfaction to the relative price level, and f HS is a second increasing function of customer satisfaction to the service level; maximizing, by the hardware processor, both the retailer's profit and the customer satisfaction, using a second mathematical equation of form max ⁡ [ ∑ i = 1 N ⁢ ∑ j = 1 M ⁢ ( ( w i ⁡ [ j ] × P j - Cost i ⁡ [ j ] ) × Sale i ⁡ [ j ] - L i ) + w × H ⁡ ( I 1 , … ⁢ , I N , w 1 , … ⁢ , w N , S 1 , … ⁢ , S N ) ] wherein, P j is an average price paid for the j th merchandise category, Cost i [j] is an average purchase price paid for the j th merchandise category in i th channel, L i is an operational cost of the i th channel, relative to the channel types, the number of merchandise and the service level, w×H(I 1 ,. .. , I N , w 1 ,. .. , w N , S 1 ,. .. , S N ) is the mathematic expression of the customer satisfaction weighted by a customer satisfaction weight represented as w, Sales i [j] is a cumulative sales of the j th merchandise category in i th channel, computed as an addition between: a first sale without cross-channel influence, expressed as a demand of the j th merchandise category adjusting a first sum of a ratio between a mathematical product of C k , a second decreasing function of the w i [j], and a third increasing function of the S i applied to k th customer segment, to a second sum of the mathematical product of C k , the second decreasing function of the w i [j] and, the third increasing function of the S i applied across the plurality of the i channel types and to the plurality of the customer segments, and a second sale with cross-channel optimization expressed as a third sum of sales of other merchandise categories multiplied by a cross channel influence matrix between the j merchandise categories with respect to the plurality of the i channel types.