Rama Ramakrishnan
Sep 1, 2018 · 1 min read

Thanks, Rishi.

IMO (other practitioners may differ on this), Recency is important because it is a proxy for a number of factors. It indicates that the customer in question:

  • Is still alive (sorry for sounding morbid)
  • Is still interested in the retailer’s products (i.e., hasn’t outgrown it, hasn’t changed allegiance to a different brand etc.)
  • Still lives near a store i.e., hasn’t moved away (this is important for bricks-and-mortar retailers)
  • ….

To put it another way, for a customer to have shopped with you recently, an enormous number of ‘bad’ things must not have happened. And those things may have happened to customers who shopped 6 months ago — that’s why they haven’t appeared again.

I hope that helps.

    Rama Ramakrishnan

    Written by

    MIT Professor, AI/ML entrepreneur/advisor. Prev: Founder/CEO CQuotient, SVP Data Science Salesforce, Chief Scientist/VP Oracle Retail, McKinsey. MIT PhD.