Dirk Van den Poel

Customer attrition analysis for financial services using proportional hazard models

This paper studies the topic of customer attrition in the context of a European financial services company. More specifically, we investigate predictors of churn incidence as part of customer relationship management (CRM). We contribute to the existing literature: (1) by combining several different types of predictors into one comprehensive retention model including several ‘new’ types of time-varying covariates related to actual customer behaviour; (2) by analysing churn behaviour based on a truly random sample of the total population using longitudinal data from a data warehouse. Our findings suggest that: (1) demographic characteristics, environmental changes and stimulating ‘interactive and continuous’ relationships with customers are of major concern when considering retention; (2) customer behaviour predictors only have a limited impact on attrition in terms of total products owned as well as the interpurchase time.

Customer base analysis: partial defection of behaviourally loyal clients in a non-contractual FMCG retail setting

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enjoys increasing attention as a countermeasure to switching behaviour of customers. Because foregone profits of (partially) defected customers are significant, an increase of the retention rate can be very profitable. In this paper, we focus on the treatment of a company’s most promising customers in a non-contractual setting. We build a model in order to predict partial defection by behaviorally-loyal clients using three classification techniques: Logistic regression, ARD Neural Networks and Random Forests. Classification accuracy (PCC) and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) are used to evaluate classifier performance. Using real-life data from an FMCG retailer we show that future partial defection can be successfully predicted. Similar to direct-marketing applications, we find that past behavioral variables, more specifically RFM variables (recency, frequency, monetary value) are the best predictors of partial customer defection.

Consumer Acceptance of the Internet as a Channel of Distribution

Abstract In this empirical study, the viability of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a channel of distribution is investigated. Two research questions are studied: (1) comparison of two non-store retailing channels with two store channels and the importance of risk relievers for each store type, and (2) consumer reaction when channel functions are transferred to the Internet. Respondents were asked to ignore security considerations in their evaluations of the Internet offers. An electronic mail questionnaire was used for data collection. Results indicate that WWW offers with a mix of risk relievers are evaluated favorably and can even challenge specialty store alternatives. Current Internet users do not seem to consider buying on the WWW to be equivalent to buying through mail order. Hence, the WWW medium may well represent the breakthrough of non-store retailing. Furthermore, the results confirm earlier findings that money-back guarantee is the most important risk reliever, followed by offering a well-known brand and a price reduction. As part of the second research question, different levels of channel functions performed by the Internet are evaluated, and the findings of this study reveal that the Internet as a reservation medium is already highly accepted. Its acceptance as a physical delivery channel is considerably lower.

Churn prediction in subscription services: An application of support vector machines while comparing two parameter-selection techniques

CRM gains increasing importance due to intensive competition and saturated markets. With the purpose of retaining customers, academics as well as practitioners find it crucial to build a churn prediction model that is as accurate as possible. This study applies support vector machines in a newspaper subscription context in order to construct a churn model with a higher predictive performance. Moreover, a comparison is made between two parameter-selection techniques, needed to implement support vector machines. Both techniques are based on grid search and cross-validation. Afterwards, the predictive performance of both kinds of support vector machine models is benchmarked to logistic regression and random forests. Our study shows that support vector machines show good generalization performance when applied to noisy marketing data. Nevertheless, the parameter optimization procedure plays an important role in the predictive performance. We show that only when the optimal parameter-selection procedure is applied, support vector machines outperform traditional logistic regression, whereas random forests outperform both kinds of support vector machines. As a substantive contribution, an overview of the most important churn drivers is given. Unlike ample research, monetary value and frequency do not play an important role in explaining churn in this subscription-services application. Even though most important churn predictors belong to the category of variables describing the subscription, the influence of several client/company-interaction variables cannot be neglected.

Predicting online-purchasing behaviour

This empirical study investigates the contribution of different types of predictors to the purchasing behaviour at an online store. We use logit modelling to predict whether or not a purchase is made during the next visit to the website using both forward and backward variable-selection techniques, as well as Furnival and Wilson’s global score search algorithm to find the best subset of predictors. We contribute to the literature by using variables from four different categories in predicting online-purchasing behaviour: (1) general clickstream behaviour at the level of the visit, (2) more detailed clickstream information, (3) customer demographics, and (4) historical purchase behaviour. The results show that predictors from all four categories are retained in the final (best subset) solution indicating that clickstream behaviour is important when determining the tendency to buy. We clearly indicate the contribution in predictive power of variables that were never used before in online purchasing studies. Detailed clickstream variables are the most important ones in classifying customers according to their online purchase behaviour. In doing so, we are able to highlight the advantage of e-commerce retailers of being able to capture an elaborate list of customer information.

Bayesian neural network learning for repeat purchase modelling in direct marketing

We focus on purchase incidence modelling for a European direct mail company. Response models based on statistical and neural network techniques are contrasted. The evidence framework of MacKay is used as an example implementation of Bayesian neural network learning, a method that is fairly robust with respect to problems typically encountered when implementing neural networks. The automatic relevance determination (ARD) method, an integrated feature of this framework, allows us to assess the relative importance of the inputs. The basic response models use operationalisations of the traditionally discussed Recency, Frequency and Monetary (RFM) predictor categories. In a second experiment, the RFM response framework is enriched by the inclusion of other (non-RFM) customer profiling predictors. We contribute to the literature by providing experimental evidence that: (1) Bayesian neural networks offer a viable alternative for purchase incidence modelling; (2) a combined use of all three RFM predictor categories is advocated by the ARD method; (3) the inclusion of non-RFM variables allows to significantly augment the predictive power of the constructed RFM classifiers; (4) this rise is mainly attributed to the inclusion of customer/company interaction variables and a variable measuring whether a customer uses the credit facilities of the direct mailing company.

Bayesian network classifiers for identifying the slope of the customer lifecycle of long-life customers

Undoubtedly, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has gained its importance through the statement that acquiring a new customer is several times more costly than retaining and selling additional products to existing customers. Consequently, marketing practitioners are currently often focusing on retaining customers for as long as possible. However, recent findings in relationship marketing literature have shown that large differences exist within the group of long-life customers in terms of spending and spending evolution. Therefore, this paper focuses on introducing a measure of a customers future spending evolution that might improve relationship marketing decision making. In this study, from a marketing point of view, we focus on predicting whether a newly acquired customer will increase or decrease his/her future spending from initial purchase information. This is essentially a classification task. The main contribution of this study lies in comparing and evaluating several Bayesian network classifiers with statistical and other artificial intelligence techniques for the purpose of classifying customers in the binary classification problem at hand. Certain Bayesian network classifiers have been recently proposed in the artificial intelligence literature as probstudy. We discuss and evaluate several types of Bayesian network classifiers and their corresponding structure learning algorithms. We contribute to the literature by providing experimental evidence that: (1) Bayesian network classifiers offer an interesting and viable alternative for our customer lifecycle slope estimation problem; (2) the Markov Blanket concept allows for a natural form of attribute selection that was very effective for the application at hand; (3) the sign of the slope can be predicted with a powerful and parsimonious general, unrestricted Bayesian network classifier; (4) a set of three variables measuring the volume of initial purchases and the degree to which customers originally buy in different categories, are powerful predictors for estimating the sign of the slope, and might therefore provide desirable additional information for relationship marketing decision making.

Joint optimization of customer segmentation and marketing policy to maximize long-term profitability

With the advent of one-to-one marketing media, e.g. targeted direct mail or internet marketing, the opportunities to develop targeted marketing campaigns are enhanced in such a way that it is now both organizationally and economically feasible to profitably support a substantially larger number of marketing segments. However, the problem of what segments to distinguish, and what actions to take towards the different segments increases substantially in such an environment. A systematic analytic procedure optimizing both steps would be very welcome.In this study, we present a joint optimization approach addressing two issues: (1) the segmentation of customers into homogeneous groups of customers, (2) determining the optimal policy (i.e., what action to take from a set of available actions) towards each segment. We implement this joint optimization framework in a direct-mail setting for a charitable organization. Many previous studies in this area highlighted the importance of the following variables: R(ecency), F(requency), and M(onetary value). We use these variables to segment customers. In a second step, we determine which marketing policy is optimal using markov decision processes, following similar previous applications. The attractiveness of this stochastic dynamic programming procedure is based on the long-run maximization of expected average profit. Our contribution lies in the combination of both steps into one optimization framework to obtain an optimal allocation of marketing expenditures. Moreover, we control segment stability and policy performance by a bootstrap procedure. Our framework is illustrated by a real-life application. The results show that the proposed model outperforms a CHAID segmentation.

CRM at a pay-TV company: Using analytical models to reduce customer attrition by targeted marketing for subscription services

The early detection of potential churners enables companies to target these customers using specific retention actions, and subsequently increase profits. This analytical CRM (Customer Relationship Management) approach is illustrated using real-life data of a European pay-TV company. Their very high churn rate has had a devastating effect on their customer base. This paper first develops different churn-prediction models: the introduction of Markov Chains in churn prediction, and a random forest model are benchmarked to a basic logistic model. The most appropriate model is subsequently used to target those customers with a high churn probability in a field experiment. Three alternative courses of marketing action are applied: giving free incentives, organizing special customer events, obtaining feedback on customer satisfaction through questionnaires. The results of this field experiment show that profits can be doubled using our churn prediction model. Moreover, profits vary enormously with respect to the selected retention action, indicating that a customer satisfaction questionnaire yields the best results, a phenomon known in the psychological literature as the ‘mere-measurement effect’.

Investigating the role of product features in preventing customer churn, by using survival analysis and choice modeling: The case of financial services

The enhancement of existing relationships is of pivotal importance to companies, since attracting new customers is known to be more expensive. Therefore, as part of their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, many researchers have been analyzing “why” customers decide to switch. However, despite its practical relevance, few studies have investigated how companies can react to defection prone customers by offering the right set of products. Additionally, within the current customer attention “hype”, one tends to overlook the nature of different products when investigating customer defection. In this research, we study the defection of the savings and investment (SI) customers of a large Belgian financial service provider. We created different SI churn behavior categories by introducing two dimensions: (i) duration of the products (fixed term versus infinity) and (ii) capital/revenue risks involved. Considering these product features, we first gain explorative insight in the timing of the churn event by means of Kaplan-Meier estimates. Secondly, we elaborate on the most alarming group of customers that emerged from the former explorative analysis. A hazard model is built to detect the most convenient product categories to cross-sell in order to reduce their churn likelihood. Complementary, a multinomial probit model is estimated to explore the customers’ preferences with respect to the product features involved and to test whether these correspond with the findings of the survival analysis. The results of our study indicate that customer retention cannot be understood by solely relying on customer characteristics. In sum, it might be true that “not all customers are created equal”, but neither are all products.