With the advent of one-to-one marketing media, e.g. targeted direct mail or internet marketing, the opportunities to develop targeted marketing (customer relationship management) campaigns are enhanced in such a way that it is now both organizationally and economically feasible to profitably...

This article seeks to gain insight into the influence of sample bias in a consumer credit scoring model. In earlier research, sample bias has been suggested to pose a sizeable threat to predictive performance and profitability due to its implications on either population drainage or biased...

Customer churn is often a rare event in service industries, but of great interest and great value. Until recently, however, class imbalance has not received much attention in the context of data mining (Weiss, 2004). In this study, we investigate how we can better handle class imbalance in churn...

This empirical study investigates the contribution of different types of predictors to the purchasing behaviour at an online store. We use logit modelling to predict whether or not a purchase is made during the next visit to the website using both forward and backward variable-selection...

The success of a direct marketing campaign is driven by the ability of companies to estimate customers’ future contribution to their profitability. Especially when considering that in retailing companies are wasting resources when targeting customers who will make purchases even in case they...

CRM gains increasing importance due to intensive competition and saturated markets. With the purpose of retaining customers, academics as well as practitioners find it crucial to build a churn prediction model that is as accurate as possible. This study applies support vector machines in a...

The enhancement of existing relationships is of pivotal importance to companies, since attracting new customers is known to be more expensive. Therefore, as part of their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, many researchers have been analyzing “why” customers decide to switch....

The early detection of potential churners enables companies to target these customers using specific retention actions, and subsequently increase profits. This analytical CRM (Customer Relationship Management) approach is illustrated using real-life data of a European pay-TV company. Their very...

In subscription services, customers who leave the company can be divided into two groups: customers who do not renew their fixed-term contract at the end of that contract, and others who just stop paying during their contract to which they are legally bound. Those two separate processes are...

Loyalty and targeting are central topics in Customer Relationship Management. Yet, the information that resides in customer databases only records transactions at a single company, whereby customer loyalty is generally unavailable. In this study, we enrich the customer database with a prediction...