Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

IMPROVING THE HIT RATES OF EXISTING CAMPAIGNS

If you have been directed to this section by the decision tree in the beginning of this chapter (Exhibit 6.1), it is because you currently are running retention campaigns yet wish to investigate whether they can become more efficient via targeting only the customer groups where the campaigns have the highest impact. This kind of analysis could be relevant in situations where an organization runs the same retention activities in the same manner over a considerable period of time—for example, follow-up calls to customers one month after they have filed a complaint. From an analytical perspective, you might have concluded earlier that these customers should be contacted since they have a significantly increased propensity of churning. But the questions raised now are:

• Are there some customer types that cannot be saved via this retention call?
• Are there some complaint types that cannot be saved via this retention call?
• Are all service agents equally good at making retention calls?
• If you find some differences, which of the three a’s will you go for: abandoning the calls to these customer groups, adapting the way they are contacted, or accepting that this is just the way it is?

Setting Up the Data

The data requirements are covered by the analytical base table as presented in Chapter 5 or the churn mart presented in this chapter. Note that in the specific case of retention calls, it would also be logical to make a churn variable that identifies ...