Çağatan Taşkın

A Two-Stage Approach for Improving Service Management in Retail Banking

Efficiency analysis is a survival tool for bank managers due to severe competition in retail banking industry. Certainly, it is important to identify the inefficient branches of a bank in building better service management and marketing strategies. The problem here is to eliminate the causes of their inefficiencies in order to improve the inefficient branches. In this study, a two-stage methodology consisting of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and data mining is proposed for solving the problem. Firstly, DEA is used for measuring the relative efficiencies of a bank’s branches. Secondly, data mining is used to extract useful information from given data consisting of the characteristics of bank branches, thus allowing bank managers to identify the underlying causes of inefficiencies and helping them to improve their service management. The approach is used in the valuation of the one’s branches of the biggest banks in Turkey.

Identifying Segments of a Domestic Tourism Market by Means of Data Mining

This paper helps to analyse a typical problem seen in the marketing systems of firms in tourism industry. The problem here is the difficulty in determining the market segments for an optimal customer management. In this work, data mining is used as a decision support tool in order to extract previously unknown patterns and ultimately comprehensible information from large databases which traditional statistical tools can not extract. The research is conducted in Bursa, the fourth biggest city of Turkey. The multi-dimensional analysis of this domestic market is very important for foreign hotel investors, tour operators and travel agencies in their investment, marketing and management strategies. For this multi-dimensional analysis, visual and robust data mining software Clementine 8.1 is used for the classification task of data mining in order to determine the market segments for optimal customer management.