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1. Introduction
Today, organizations recognize the commercial advantage of relationship with customers and calculating customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is usually measured in a period of time from the first transaction till present or in a future time. CLV indicates the difference between incomes and costs created by one customer (Chang, 2011). Mudie and Cottam (1999) believed that CLV is dependent on purchase frequency, customer life expectancy, and average of transaction value. Hoekstra and Huizingh (1999) proposed a perceptual CLV model in which, most of the CLV equations were derived from an original equation, in which the income obtained from customer is subtracted from the cost of income generation, and regarding interest rate of company, its present value is calculated. Hwang et al. (2004) defined an equation for calculating potential and historical customer values which is used as the basis of the proposed approach of this paper.
Customer loyalty is a basic factor in business survival and improvement. A loyal customer is regarded as a competitive asset for an organization (Chen, 2012). Moreover, meeting customer’s needs will gradually create customer’s feelings of satisfaction, loyalty, and trusting organization. In general, customer satisfaction is a prerequisite for customer loyalty (Reichheld and Teal, 1996; Abdinnour-Helm et al., 2005). Literature confirms the existence of linear relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty (Chen, 2012), but different customers have various requirements varying during the time (Chang, 2011). This might influence the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty (Shahin et al., 2011).
Companies use new product development (NPD) as a competitive weapon for survival and success in dynamic markets. New profitable products are not only effective in penetrating markets, but also result in keeping relationships with customers and profitability. Therefore, in decisions related to developing a new product, customer requirements, customer satisfaction and product quality should be considered (Chan and Ip, 2011).
In previous researches on CLV, historical information of customer had been used, and none of the statistical estimators of CLV has considered customer’s satisfaction ratio prior to selling product/service. In order to fill this gap, in this study, the Kano model is used to determine customers’ desired requirements as a pre estimation of customer satisfaction approach (Kano et al., 1984). Then, the computed satisfaction coefficient is regarded...