Churn studies have been used for many years to increase profitability as well as to make customer-company relations sustainable. Ordinary artificial neural network (ANN) and convolution neural network (CNN) are widely used in churn analysis due to their ability to process large amounts of customer data. In this study, an ANN and a CNN model are proposed to predict whether customers in the retail industry will churn in the future. The models we proposed were compared with many machine learning methods that are frequently used in churn prediction studies. The results of the models were compared via accuracy classification tools, which are precision, recall, and AUC. The study results showed that the proposed deep learning-based churn prediction model has a better classification performance. The CNN model produced a 97.62% of accuracy rate which resulted in a better classification and prediction success than other compared models.
In customer‐oriented systems, customer lifetime value (CLV) has been of significant importance for academia and marketing practitioners, especially within the scope of analytical modeling. CLV is a critical approach to managing and organizing a company's profitability. With the vast availability of consumer data, business analytics (BA) tools and approaches, alongside CLV models, have been applied to gain deeper insights into customer behaviors and decision‐making processes. Despite the recognized importance of CLV, there is a noticeable gap in comprehensive analyses and reviews of BA techniques applied to CLV. This study aims to fill this gap by conducting a thorough survey of the state‐of‐the‐art investigations on CLV models integrated with BA approaches, thereby contributing to a research agenda in this field. The review methodology consists of three main steps: identification of relevant studies, creating a coding plan, and ensuring coding reliability. First, relevant studies were identified using predefined keywords. Next, a coding plan—one of the study's significant contributions—was developed to evaluate these studies comprehensively. Finally, the coding plan's reliability was tested by three experts before being applied to the selected studies. Additionally, specific evaluation criteria in the coding plan were implemented to introduce new insights. This study presents exciting and valuable results from various perspectives, providing a crucial reference for academic researchers and marketing practitioners interested in the intersection of BA and CLV.
Customer churn is a critical concern in the Software as a Service (SaaS) sector, potentially impacting long-term growth within the cloud computing industry. The scarcity of research on customer churn models in SaaS, particularly regarding diverse feature selection methods and predictive algorithms, highlights a significant gap. Addressing this would enhance academic discourse and provide essential insights for managerial decision-making. This study introduces a novel approach to SaaS churn prediction using the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) for feature selection. Results show that WOA-reduced datasets improve processing efficiency and outperform full-variable datasets in predictive performance. The study encompasses a range of prediction techniques with three distinct datasets evaluated derived from over 1,000 users of a multinational SaaS company: the WOA-reduced dataset, the full-variable dataset, and the chi-squared-derived dataset. These three datasets were examined with the most used in literature, k-nearest neighbor, Decision Trees, Naïve Bayes, Random Forests, and Neural Network techniques, and the performance metrics such as Area Under Curve, Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 Score were used as classification success. The results demonstrate that the WOA-reduced dataset outperformed the full-variable and chi-squared-derived datasets regarding performance metrics.
1 January 2018 in Baltic Journal of Modern Computing