Preventing Churn in Telecommunications: The Forgotten Network

This paper outlines an approach developed as a part of a company-wide churn management initiative of a major European telecom operator. We are focusing on explanatory churn model for the postpaid segment, assuming that the mobile telecom network, the key resource of operators, is also a churn driver in case it under delivers to customers' expectations. Typically, insights generated by churn models are deployed in marketing campaigns; our model's insights are used in network optimization in order to remove the key network related churn drivers and therefore prevent churn, rather than cure it. The insights generated by the model have caused a paradigm shift in managing the network with the operator where the research was conducted.