scholarly journals A Dual-Step Multi-Algorithm Approach for Churn Prediction in Pre-Paid Telecommunications Service Providers

Author(s):  
Ali Tamaddoni Jahromi ◽  
Mehrad Moeini ◽  
Issar Akbari ◽  
Aram Akbarzadeh

Nowadays customer churn has become the main concern of companies which are active in different industries. Among all industries which suffer from this issue, telecommunications industry can be considered in the top of the list with approximate annual churn rate of 30%. Dealing with this problem, there exist different approaches via developing predictive models for customer churn but due to the nature of pre-paid mobile telephony market which is not contract-based, customer churn is not easily traceable and definable, thus constructing a predictive model would be of high complexity. Handling this issue, in this study, we developed a dual-step model building approach, which consists of clustering phase and classification phase. With this regard firstly, the customer base was divided into four clusters, based on their RFM related features, with the aim of extracting a logical definition of churn, and secondly, based on the churn definitions that were extracted in the first step, different algorithms were utilized with the intention of constructing predictive models for churn in our developed clusters. Evaluating and comparing the performance of the employed algorithms based on “gain measure”, we concluded that employing a multi-algorithm approach in the model constructing step, instead of single-algorithm one, can bring the maximum gain among the tested algorithms.

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan U. Becker ◽  
Martin Spann ◽  
Christian Barrot

In recent years, service providers have identified the proactive postsales service (PPS) as a viable measure for preempting service failures and their negative consequences. Due to the high costs associated with PPSs, companies are looking for ways to increase their efficiency. To understand how companies can increase their revenues and lower their costs, this study investigates how cross-selling activities and different media types affect the impact of a PPS on inbound service calls and customer churn. Based on a large-scale field experiment in the telecommunications industry, as well as a controlled lab experiment, the results demonstrate the overall effectiveness of the PPS and indicate two mediating effects. While the effect of cross-selling on customer churn and service calls is mediated by the customers’ uncertainty regarding the company’s motives, it is the customers’ perception of privacy invasion that mediates the influence of the contact medium on the effectiveness of the PPS. Our finding that PPS contacts have to be clear in their message and should not be perceived as invasive is an indication of the importance of service-(post)sales ambidexterity.


Author(s):  
Min Zhang ◽  
Katia Passerini

Xiaomi Corporation is a very successful company in the wireless telecommunications industry in China. The company has been able to adopt a “fan-centric” business model that includes extensive input from their customer base on handset design, user interface design, and features for other products/services offered by the company. The “innovation ecosystem” the company created has allowed a recent surge in sales and popularity that provides a model for other wireless telecommunications companies ranging from network service providers to application developers to follow.


Author(s):  
K. Prakash Krishnan ◽  
A. Kumar Kombaiya

In recent days, telecom industry plays a vital role in our daily life. During corona period entire world depends on the telecom services domain. But telecome industry has been facing many surivival problems in the global market since last 10 years due to heavy competition between competitors. To stand in this field, service providers have to understand the complete customer requirements and provide the efficient services to stop the customer movement from one network to another network. Customer churn is one of the most critical problem faced by the telecom industry. In this industry, it is more expensive to bring the new customers as compared to retain the existing customers. The objective of customer churn prediction is to find the subscribers that are ready to move from the current service provider in advance. Churn prediction allows the service providers to offer new benefits and campaign offers to retain the existing customer in the same network. Technically this term would be call it as ‘Win back Situation’ in telecom industry. The high volume of data generated by telecom industry , with the help of data warehosuing and business intelligence implementation would become the main asset for predicting the customer churn. To prevent the churn many models and methods are used by researchers. In this paper, we reviewed different mining methods and the most popular algorithms which used in telecom industry. But this model is not only for telecom domain, it can be implement for other domains which has highly depends on customer interactions.


2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 68-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Bullock

This paper outlines some of the challenges that prevent Muslim women from becoming full members of the Ummah. Although we often hear of the rights of"women in ]slam'' in the abstract,1 we must know the specifics to improve the lives of Muslim women in reality. This paper tries to provide those specifics. It does not analyze the items, since the issues covered are many and disparate; rather, it simply highlights some concerns so that qual­ified practitioners can discuss and debate remedies. The bulk of this paper's main concern is to address some of the obstacles that hamper efforts to alleviate these challenges. The first section presents the list of challenges, while the second sec­tion discusses these obstacles. The paper concludes with a series of proposals intended to assuage the listed problems. Therefore, its focus is on more broad-based remedies rather than a specific remedy for a specific problem. The paper's underlying assump­tions are that women should be fully included in the Ummah and that this is not the case now. To make this clear, a definition of "full inclusion in the Ummah" is given before the paper proceeds to listing the challenges ...


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 445
Author(s):  
Wen-Kuo Chen ◽  
Venkateswarlu Nalluri ◽  
Suresh Ma ◽  
Mei-Min Lin ◽  
Ching-Torng Lin

Different sources of risk factors can occur in sustainable supply chain management due to its complex nature. The telecommunication service firm cannot implement multiple improvement practices altogether to overcome the risk factors with limited resources. The industries should evaluate the relationship between risk factors and explore the determinants of improvement measures. The purpose of the present study is to identify and analyze critical risk factors (CRFs) for enhancing sustainable supply chain management practices in the Indian telecommunication industry using interpretive structural modelling (ISM). Risk factors are identified through a literature survey, and then with the help of experts, nine CRFs are identified using a fuzzy Delphi method (FDM). The relationship among these CRFs has been analyzed using ISM, and the driving and the dependence power of those CRFs are analyzed. Results indicate that both “government policies (laws and regulations)” and “the impact of rapid change in technology” are independent or key factors that affect the sustainability of the telecommunications supply chain. In addition, results provide significant managerial implications, including enhanced sustainability, and the government should build justice, fairness, open laws, certainties, and regulations to prevent risk in the telecommunications industry supply chain; service providers should monitor the rapidly evolving technologies and focus on technical learning and organizational capacity development to overcome the impact of technological changes. The contribution of this study is using a novel approach to establish a hierarchical structural model for an effective understanding of CRFs relationships and to explore decisive risk factors that can help telecom service providers to better plan and design effective improvement strategies to enhance sustainability supply chain management.


Author(s):  
Cinzia Giannetti ◽  
Aniekan Essien

AbstractSmart factories are intelligent, fully-connected and flexible systems that can continuously monitor and analyse data streams from interconnected systems to make decisions and dynamically adapt to new circumstances. The implementation of smart factories represents a leap forward compared to traditional automation. It is underpinned by the deployment of cyberphysical systems that, through the application of Artificial Intelligence, integrate predictive capabilities and foster rapid decision-making. Deep Learning (DL) is a key enabler for the development of smart factories. However, the implementation of DL in smart factories is hindered by its reliance on large amounts of data and extreme computational demand. To address this challenge, Transfer Learning (TL) has been proposed to promote the efficient training of models by enabling the reuse of previously trained models. In this paper, by means of a specific example in aluminium can manufacturing, an empirical study is presented, which demonstrates the potential of TL to achieve fast deployment of scalable and reusable predictive models for Cyber Manufacturing Systems. Through extensive experiments, the value of TL is demonstrated to achieve better generalisation and model performance, especially with limited datasets. This research provides a pragmatic approach towards predictive model building for cyber twins, paving the way towards the realisation of smart factories.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Sowey

Forced marriage was criminalised in Australia in March 2013, putting the issue on the agenda of policy-makers and social service providers. Increasingly, however, it is being recognised that criminal laws alone cannot address the practice; protective and preventative strategies are also needed. This paper argues that strategies to address forced marriage will be most effective if they are informed by contextualised and emic understandings of the phenomenon, that is, by the perspectives of individuals, families and communities who are directly affected by forced marriage. Primary research is required to obtain such perspectives. Research into forced marriage in Australia is still in its infancy, and primary research is almost non-existent. This paper, then, looks to primary research from the UK and other comparable Western multicultural nations, offering a critique of this body of literature before drawing out what is revealed about why marriages are forced, how marriages are forced, and what people in forced marriage situations want. The implications of criminal prosecution are then considered in light of this emic understanding. The legal definition of forced marriage hinges on the concept of consent: it is consent that distinguishes an arranged marriage from a forced one. In the UK, the notion of consent has been robustly problematised. However this is not the case in Australia at present, and this paper critiques the value of the concept of consent given the social contexts of forced marriage described above. The implications of this critique for the application of Australia’s forced marriage law are then considered. Finally, from a place of contextualised and emic understanding of forced marriage, this paper considers how protective and preventative strategies might be enhanced.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-358
Author(s):  
Robert Smith ◽  
Mark Perry

The COVID-19 pandemic and the recent term of the United States President, Donald Trump, brought the term “fake news” to the attention of the broader community. Some jurisdictions have developed anti-fake news legislation, whilst others have used existing cybercrime legislation. A significant deficiency is the lack of a clear definition of fake news. Just because a person calls something “fake news” does not mean that it is indeed false. Especially during pandemics, the primary aim should be to have misinformation and disinformation removed quickly from the web rather than prosecute offenders. The most widely accepted international anti-cybercrime treaty is the Convention on Cybercrime developed by the Council of Europe, which is silent on fake news, the propagation of which may be a cybercrime. There is an Additional Protocol that deals with hate speech, which the authors consider to be a subset of fake news. Using examples from Southeast Asia, the paper develops a comprehensive definition of what constitutes fake news. It ensures that it covers the various flavours of fake news that have been adopted in various jurisdictions. Hate speech can be considered a subset of fake news and is defined as the publication or distribution of fake news with the intention to incite hatred or violence against ethnic, religious, political, and other groups in society. The paper proposes some offences, including those that should be applied to platform service providers. The recommendations could be easily adapted for inclusion in the Convention on Cybercrime or other regional conventions. Such an approach is desirable as cybercrime, including propagating fake news, is not a respecter of national borders, and has widespread deleterious effects. Keywords: Fake news; hate speech; Convention on Cybercrime; draft legislation


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volodymyr Ponomarenko ◽  
Oleh Kolodiziev ◽  
Iryna Chmutova

Despite the widespread use of benchmarking as an effective tool for improving the efficiency of the bank’s functioning, its implementation does not take into account the relation between comparable performance indicators, the choice of benchmark for comparison, deviations of indicators from target values with stages of the bank’s life cycle, which cause differences in the intensity and characteristics of development of financial institutions. The procedure for identifying a reference bank for comparison is also insufficiently specified, which is important in terms of adapting its experience by the recipient bank due to the possible fundamental differences in their functioning. Therefore, the article has modified the technology of benchmarking of the bank’s performance based on the life cycle concept and the DEA approach. The research is based on the use of the DEA method to determine the most efficient bank as a reference bank in benchmarking comparison; canonical analysis – for the formation of a list of indicators of bank performance; cluster analysis – to substantiate the levels of deviations of the actual values of comparable indicators from the target ones. The study envisages, firstly, the selection of indicators for benchmarking comparisons based on the identification of causal relationships between the indicators of subsystems “Finance”, “Customers”, “Business processes”, “Personnel development” that arise at each stage of a bank’s life cycle; secondly, the choice of a benchmark bank for comparison according to the maximum value of the performance indicator calculated through the DEA method for a set of banks that are at one and the same stage of their life cycle; thirdly, definition of the range of deviations (low, permissible, critical) of the actual values of comparable indicators of the effectiveness of management of finance, customer base, business processes and personnel of the bank from the target ones. A practical testing of the benchmarking technology was carried out on the example of Ukrainian banks, whose stage in 2016 was identified as “intense growth”.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer JooYeon Lee ◽  
Zecong Ma

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to understand the process and consequences of the two-way communication between consumers and businesses on online-to-offline (O2O) diagnosis-and-cure services platforms and (2) to examine how consumer request-specific factors and service quote-specific factors influence consumer decisions in the interactive marketing context.Design/methodology/approachThe study analyzes a dataset of 17,878 service requests and 57,867 price quotes obtained from an O2O platform bridging consumers and automotive repair shops. On the platform, consumers request service quotes by uploading the description of automotive damage and multiple service providers suggest price quotes. The authors formulated a logit model to examine consumer decisions of responding service quotes.FindingsThis paper finds that (1) consumers receiving more severe diagnostic results are more likely to respond to the price quotes, and (2) diagnostic severity and inconsistency moderate the impacts of geographic distance, shop size, and quote price on consumers' responses to the service quotes.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper fills the gap in the literature by advancing the consumer decision processing model to address the interactive shopping experience on O2O diagnosis-and-cure services platforms. The findings are limited by the data and the research context.Practical implicationsFor marketing practitioners, the empirical results imply specific positioning and targeting strategies for markets with informational and geographic barriers to expand the market scope and customer base.Originality/valueThe present work is the first to examine the consumer decision process on O2O diagnosis-and-cure service platforms. It adds value to the literature by investigating how consumers update their problem awareness through the service request-specific factors (i.e. diagnostic severity and diagnostic inconsistency) and how the request-specific factors moderate the impacts of the quote-specific factors (i.e. shop distance, shop size and quote price) on consumers' responses to price quote. The conceptual model and empirical findings provide theoretical and practical values for e-commerce researchers and practitioners.


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