Title: Developing customer churn models for customer relationship management

Authors: Stephen Rodriguez; Heechang Shin

Addresses: Iona College, New Rochelle, NY 10801, USA ' Iona College, New Rochelle, NY 10801, USA

Abstract: Customer churn is the term used to describe customers who terminate their relationship with a company. Since churn means a loss of revenue to a company, it is important to identify customer churn and provide incentives to them in order to retain them to the company. This paper aims to design methodologies for the customer churn prediction problem in wireless telecommunications industry. Since the number of features in customer churn dataset is rather large, the performance of decision trees is significantly degraded if inappropriate features are selected and used for building decision trees. This paper finds features that have high effect on customer churn, and to design methodologies that will cope with high dimensionality of dataset and the customer churn prediction problem. This paper provides experimental results of a set of data mining schemes and feature selection methods for customer churn datasets.

Keywords: customer churn; classification models; data mining; decision trees; customer retention; customer relationship management; CRM; wireless communications; telecommunications industry.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBCRM.2013.058990

International Journal of Business Continuity and Risk Management, 2013 Vol.4 No.4, pp.302 - 322

Published online: 31 Mar 2014 *

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