Data Mining as a Tool to Predict Churn Behavior of Customers

Customer is the heart and soul of any organization. The era of globalization and cut throat competition has changed the basic concept of marketing, now marketing is not confined to selling the products to the customers, but the objective is to reach to the hearts of the customers so that they feel belongingness towards the organizations and hence should remain the loyal customers. In the dynamic market scenarios where companies are coming up with varied options every now and then, customer retention is a critical area to ponder upon, as customers usually churn from one company to another quite often and this too is happening at an alarming rate and is becoming the most important issue in customer relationship management. So prediction of the customer behaviour and hence taking remedial actions before hand is the need of the hour. But the ever growing data bases make it difficult to analyze the data and to forecast the future trends. The solution lies in the use of Data Mining tools for predicting the churn behavior of the customers. This paper throws light on the underlying technology and the perspective applications of data mining in predicting the churn behavior of the customers and hence paving path for better customer relationship management.