I played the role of Digital Accelerator (Forage Virtual Internship) on behalf of PwC. The retention manager of PhoneNow (a telecom company) needed a retention dashboard in order to understand their customers better and, to take a proactive role in attending to at risk customers who are likely to leave.

Some of the key inputs that she needed were:

1. Customers who left within the last month.
2. Services each customer has signed up for: phone, multiple lines, internet, online security, online backup, device protection, tech support, and streaming TV and movies.
3. Customer account information: how long as a customer, contract, payment method, paperless billing, monthly charges, total charges and number of tickets opened in the categories administrative and technical.
4. Demographic info about customers – gender, age range, and if they have partners and dependents.

Key Insights

• <65 years age group account for 87% of the current customers. Of these, about 61% have no dependents.
• More than half (57.3%) of the customers lost used electronic checks payment method. It has the highest churn rate (45.3%) among the different payment methods.
• 90% of the customers lost (88.55%) used monthly contracts. Monthly contracts have the highest churn rate(42.7%) among the different contract types.
• Less than1 year tenure customers have the highest churn rate (47.4%), almost double the overall churn rate (26.5%).

Recommendations

• Current customers that have 0-12 tenure, <65 years and have no dependents, account for 64% of internet service users. About 75% of these internet users are not using streaming , device protection, online backup or even online security services. There is an opportunity to create marketing campaigns to promote these services to this customer group.
• The retention team can find out from customers the challenges they face while using electronic check payment method and work with the team responsible to streamline this payment process. They could also work with the marketing team to promote bank and credit card payment methods (collectively have 16.1% churn rate).
• The retention team could carry out customer surveys (Customers with <1 year account for 84.42% of monthly contract users) to get feedback about monthly contracts. They can explore how to improve the value proposition for monthly contract customers e.g. new features, better customer support, attractive offers etc.
• The data only had information on whether one was a senior citizen or not. Gathering birthdate and location data would help the retention team to better understand users.

Users are able to filter the various dashboards by age range, gender, tenure categories.

DATA SOURCE: Forage Virtual Internship (PwC Switzerland) - Customer Retention Project