Identifying Negative Influencers in Mobile Customer Churn

Customer churn, the loss of customers for a company, is one of the biggest loss of revenue for Verizon Wireless and other wireless telecommunications companies. Many companies use the lifetime value of a customer, the expected future cash flow from a particular customer, to determine long-term allocation of resources and human capital. As a result, the sudden defection of customers can greatly hinder the long-term growth of these companies. For most companies, providing discounts and other incentives to stop a customer from churning is relatively less expensive than creating a subscription policy with a new customer, so companies prefer to retain customers rather than replace them. Historically, business analysts have used logistic regression models and decision trees to identify which customers are at high-risk for churning.