A Novel Framework for Mitigating Intra-operator Customer Churn in Telecommunications

Customer churn is one of the fundamental problems in telecommunications industry. Identifying potential churners in the early stage is an effective approach to preventing customer churn. Previous studies largely focused on churners from one operator to another. In this paper, we consider an interesting scenario where customer churn occurs within a specific operator (intra-operator), i.e., customers of China Mobile switch their telecommunication services from fourth generation (4G) to third generation/second generation (3G/2G). Since mechanism for intra-operator customer churn is quite different, previous studies fall short for this new problem. We propose a novel framework to address the emerging intra-operator customer churn problem by investigating the relations between \pmb4G service plans and switching behaviors of customers, unveiling the underpinned cause of the relations. Specifically, we first establish a classification criterion to estimate current service usage status of each customer. Then, we assign switching score to each customer which can be used to reflect switching likelihood of the customer. Finally, we establish the relations between 4G service plans and switching behaviors of customers by introducing two new concepts: changing trend and design evaluation score. We find that some features of 4G service plans indeed affect switching behaviors of customers significantly. Our framework can provide insight into the reasonable design of 4G service plans. Experimental results based on real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.