Customer development and retention on a Web-banking site

Banks and other financial institutions are trying to create one-on-one relationships with customers. To build these relationships, banks must identify how visitors become established loyal customers. The Customer Life Cycle (CLC) illustrates that a customer's financial behavior changes throughout his or her life. This article reports on a real-world application of customer development and retention on a Web-banking site using clickstream data from a financial institution in The Netherlands. It is shown that visitors and customers differ in online development over time. Clickstream analysis is an effective tool for creating a complete picture of customer activity and helps to give a precise understanding of customer online behavior at an individual level.