A Methodology of Customer Churn Prediction based on Two-Dimensional Loyalty Segmentation

Most industries have recently become aware of the importance of customer lifetime value as they are exposed to a competitive environment. As a result, preventing customers from churn is becoming a more important business issue than securing new customers. This is because maintaining churn customers is far more economical than securing new customers, and in fact, the acquisition cost of new customers is known to be five to six times higher than the maintenance cost of churn customers. Also, Companies that effectively prevent customer churn and improve customer retention rates are known to have a positive effect on not only increasing the company's profitability but also improving its brand image by improving customer satisfaction. Predicting customer churn, which had been conducted as a sub-research area for CRM, has recently become more important as a big data-based performance marketing theme due to the development of business machine learning technology. Until now, research on customer churn prediction has been carried out actively in such sectors as the mobile telecommunication industry, the financial industry, the distribution industry, and the game industry, which are highly competitive and urgent to manage churn. In addition, These churn prediction studies were focused on improving the performance of the churn prediction model itself, such as simply comparing the performance of various models, exploring features that are effective in forecasting departures, or developing new ensemble techniques, and were limited in terms of practical utilization because most studies considered the entire customer group as a group and developed a predictive model. As such, the main purpose of the existing related research was to improve the performance of the predictive model itself, and there was a relatively lack of research to improve the overall customer churn prediction process. In fact, customers in the business have different behavior characteristics due to heterogeneous transaction patterns, and the resulting churn rate is different, so it is unreasonable to assume the entire customer as a single customer group. Therefore, it is desirable to segment customers according to customer classification criteria, such as loyalty, and to operate an appropriate churn prediction model individually, in order to carry out effective customer churn predictions in heterogeneous industries. Of course, in some studies, there are studies in which customers are subdivided using clustering techniques and applied a churn prediction model for individual customer groups. Although this process of predicting churn can produce better predictions than a single predict model for the entire customer population, there is still room for improvement in that clustering is a mechanical, exploratory grouping technique that calculates distances based on inputs and does not reflect the strategic intent of an entity such as loyalties. This study proposes a segment-based customer departure prediction process (CCP/2DL: Customer Churn Prediction based on Two-Dimensional Loyalty segmentation) based on two-dimensional customer loyalty, assuming that successful customer churn management can be better done through improvements in the overall process than through the performance of the model itself. CCP/2DL is a series of churn prediction processes that segment two-way, quantitative and qualitative loyalty-based customer, conduct secondary grouping of customer segments according to churn patterns, and then independently apply heterogeneous churn prediction models for each churn pattern group. Performance comparisons were performed with the most commonly applied the General churn prediction process and the Clustering-based churn prediction process to assess the relative excellence of the proposed churn prediction process. The General churn prediction process used in this study refers to the process of predicting a single group of customers simply intended to be predicted as a machine learning model, using the most commonly used churn predicting method. And the Clustering-based churn prediction process is a method of first using clustering techniques to segment customers and implement a churn prediction model for each individual group. In cooperation with a global NGO, the proposed CCP/2DL performance showed better performance than other methodologies for predicting churn. This churn prediction process is not only effective in predicting churn, but can also be a strategic basis for obtaining a variety of customer observations and carrying out other related performance marketing activities.

이차원 고객충성도 세그먼트 기반의 고객이탈예측 방법론

CRM의 하위 연구 분야로 진행되었던 고객이탈예측은 최근 비즈니스 머신러닝 기술의 발전으로 인해 빅데이터 기반의 퍼포먼스 마케팅 주제로 더욱 그 중요도가 높아지고 있다. 그러나, 기존의 관련 연구는 예측 모형 자체의 성능을 개선시키는 것이 주요 목적이었으며, 전체적인 고객이탈예측 프로세스를 개선하고자 하는 연구는 상대적으로 부족했다. 본 연구는 성공적인 고객이탈관리가 모형 자체의 성능보다는 전체 프로세스의 개선을 통해 더 잘 이루어질 수 있다는 가정하에, 이차원 고객충성도 세그먼트 기반의 고객이탈예측 프로세스 (CCP/2DL: Customer Churn Prediction based on Two-Dimensional Loyalty segmentation)를 제안한다. CCP/2DL은 양방향, 즉 양적 및 질적 로열티 기반의 고객세분화를 시행하고, 고객세그먼트들을 이탈패턴에 따라 2차 그룹핑을 실시한 뒤, 이탈패턴 그룹별 이질적인 이탈예측 모형을 독립적으로 적용하는 일련의 이탈예측 프로세스이다. 제안한 이탈예측 프로세스의 상대적 우수성을 평가하기 위해 기존의 범용이탈예측 프로세스와 클러스터링 기반 이탈예측 프로세스와의 성능 비교를 수행하였다. 글로벌 NGO 단체인 A사의 협력으로 후원자 데이터를 활용한 분석과 검증을 수행했으며, 제안한 CCP/2DL의 성능이 다른 이탈예측 방법론보다 우수한 성능을 보이는 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 이탈예측 프로세스는 이탈예측에도 효과적일 뿐만 아니라, 다양한 고객통찰력을 확보하고, 관련된 다른 퍼포먼스 마케팅 활동을 수행할 수 있는 전략적 기반이 될 수 있다는 점에서 연구의 의의를 찾을 수 있다.