'Teaching Case': Who Renews? Who Leaves? Identifying Customer Churn in a Telecom Company Using Big Data Techniques

Within the context of the telecom industry, this teaching case is an active learning analytics exercise to help students build hands-on expertise on how to utilize Big Data to solve a business problem. Particularly, the case utilizes an analytics method to help develop a customer retention strategy to mitigate against an increasing customer churn problem in a telecom company. Traditionally, the forecast of customer churn uses various demographic and cell phone usage data. Big Data techniques permit a much finer granularity in the prediction of churn by analyzing specific activities a customer undertakes before churning. The authors help students to understand how data from customer interactions with the company through multiple channels can be combined to create a "session." Subsequently, the authors demonstrate the use of effective visualization to identify the most relevant paths to customer churn. The Teradata Aster Big Data platform is used in developing this case study.