Yashoda Bhagwat was a fourth year doctoral student at Georgia State University in the Center for Excellence in Brand and Customer Management. Prior to starting the doctoral program she earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and her Master’s degree from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Her research interests lie under the umbrella of Customer Relationship Management and she takes particular interest in solving real world problems for firms. For example, one of her current research projects explores customer “winback” initiatives that firms use to reacquire defected customers in an increasingly competitive market. However, before firms spend on winback initiatives they must ask which customers are worth trying to win back and how these customers should be reacquired. Yashoda addresses these questions by examining how to predict whether a “lost” customer will be profitable in his or her “second lifetime” based on his or her first lifetime behavior. Another area of interest of Yashoda’s is the concept of customer engagement. Does investment in customer engagement initiatives pay off? How can firms engage their customers? She proposes that encouraging customers to take part in gifting behavior is one way to effectively engage them with the firm and to consequently see profitable outcomes. She looks at individual transactions over time and examines whether customers who engage in gifting behavior (i.e. give gifts, receive gifts, buy or redeem gift cards) are more profitable than customers who do not engage in gifting behavior. Yashoda has presented some of her work at the Marketing Science and Winter AMA Educators’ Conferences. In her spare time she is a sports enthusiast, foodie, and dog lover.

Awards and Honors:

American Marketing Association – Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow