Survival analysis in a business context: how to control the abandons of my subscribers

The statistical literature proposed many contributions about survival analysis in medical research, in this work this approach is proposed in a business context. The aim of this paper is to control the mortality of the users belonging to an e-mail subscribers list for a company operating in the healthcare information sector. Having available the survival times for each subscriber, the choice was oriented to survival models to evaluate the abandon of the customers. A survival analysis was conducted through a Cox model considering some risk factors of the subscriber. The selected Cox model carried to the identification of risk profiles representing different situations in terms of probability of abandon.