The Role of Peer Influence in Churn in Wireless Networks

Subscriber churn remains a top challenge for wireless carriers. These carriers need to understand the determinants of churn to confidently apply effective retention strategies to ensure their profitability and growth. In this paper, we look at the effect of peer influence on churn and we try to disentangle it from other effects that drive simultaneous churn across friends but that do not relate to peer influence. We analyze a random sample of roughly 10 thousand subscribers from large dataset from a major wireless carrier over a period of 10 months. We apply survival models and generalized propensity score to identify the role of peer influence. We show that the propensity to churn increases when friends do and that it increases more when many strong friends churn. Therefore, our results suggest that churn managers should consider strategies aimed at preventing group churn. We also show that survival models fail to disentangle homophily from peer influence over-estimating the effect of peer influence.Comment: Accepted in Seventh ASE International Conference on Social Computing (Socialcom 2014), Best Paper Award Winne

Determinants of Financial Performance in Internet Service Providers in Kenya

Due to the increase in competition and increasing market liberalization, firms in the telecommunications industry are facing a threat to the profit sustainability. Furthermore, customers’ preferences are dangerously volatile and satisfaction of their diverse needs can prove arduous and the heightened customer awareness results in search for better alternative offerings in the market. As a result, customers may voluntarily switch from one vendor to the other. The study adopted a descriptive study design. The population was ISP firms in Kenya from which 10 large ISPs were selected. A total of 50 questionnaires were mailed to the managers of these firms. Primary data was collected through structured questionnaires. Data was analyzed using descriptive analysis and regression analysis. The study found that before customer make a decision to purchase or stay with a service provider, they considered service uptime, network coverage, and customer service. The regression results showed that product pricing, customer service, and service uptime had negative but insignificant effects on firm performance while parent shareholding and network coverage had positive effects on firm performance. The study concludes that the factors influencing customer staying in a provider were service uptime, customer service, and network coverage. The study also concludes that product pricing, customer service, parent shareholding, network coverage, and service uptime do not have a significant effect on firm performance. Thus the financial performance of ISPs in Kenya is not influenced by the churn factors.  The study recommends that Internet Service Providers in Kenya should ensure that they enhance the level of service uptime as this was a major factor that customers considered before making a decision to purchase an ISP product or to stay with the same ISP. The study also recommends that Internet Service Providers should have large network coverage and not just limit themselves to a small or specific area to cover. Third, the study recommends that Internet Service Providers should invest in a modern and efficient customer care service that can provide solutions to customers who have issues with their internet. This was an important purchase decision factor by customers. Keywords: Financial Performance, Internet Service Providers, Keny

Quadri-dimensional approach for data analytics in mobile networks

The telecommunication market is growing at a very fast pace with the evolution of new technologies to support high speed throughput and the availability of a wide range of services and applications in the mobile networks. This has led to a need for communication service providers (CSPs) to shift their focus from network elements monitoring towards services monitoring and subscribers’ satisfaction by introducing the service quality management (SQM) and the customer experience management (CEM) that require fast responses to reduce the time to find and solve network problems, to ensure efficiency and proactive maintenance, to improve the quality of service (QoS) and the quality of experience (QoE) of the subscribers. While both the SQM and the CEM demand multiple information from different interfaces, managing multiple data sources adds an extra layer of complexity with the collection of data. While several studies and researches have been conducted for data analytics in mobile networks, most of them did not consider analytics based on the four dimensions involved in the mobile networks environment which are the subscriber, the handset, the service and the network element with multiple interface correlation. The main objective of this research was to develop mobile network analytics models applied to the 3G packet-switched domain by analysing data from the radio network with the Iub interface and the core network with the Gn interface to provide a fast root cause analysis (RCA) approach considering the four dimensions involved in the mobile networks. This was achieved by using the latest computer engineering advancements which are Big Data platforms and data mining techniques through machine learning algorithms.Electrical and Mining EngineeringM. Tech. (Electrical Engineering

The effect of friends’ churn on consumer behavior in mobile networks

We study how consumers decide which tariff plan to choose and whether to churn when their friends churn in the mobile industry. We develop a theoretical model showing conditions under which users remain with their carrier and conditions under which they churn when their friends do. We then use a large and rich anonymized longitudinal panel of call detailed records to characterize the consumers’ path to death with unprecedented level of detail. We explore the structure of the network inferred from these data to derive instruments for friends’ churn, which is typically endogenous in network settings. This allows us to econometrically identify the effect of peer influence in our setting. On average, we find that each additional friend that churns increases the monthly churn rate by 0.06 percent. The observed monthly churn rate across our dataset is 2.15 percent. We also find that firms introducing the pre-paid tariff plans that charge the same price to call users inside and outside the carrier help retain consumers that would otherwise churn. In our setting, without this tariff plan the monthly churn rate could have been as high as 8.09 percent. We perform a number of robustness checks, in particular to how we define friends in the social graph, and show that our results remain unchanged. Our paper shows that the traditional definition of customer lifetime value underestimates the value of consumers and, in particular, that of consumers with more friends due to the effect of contagious churn and, therefore, managers should actively take into account the structure of the social network when prioritizing whom to target during retention campaigns.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Mobile Subscribers\u27 Willingness to Churn Under the Mobile Number Portability (MNP)

Mobile number portability (MNP) means that customers using mobile service can retain their telephone numbers when they change operators. Mobile carriers are concerned about which factors influence willingness to churn of customers. This study examined these concerns through three steps. The first is checking whether willingness to churn between the different situations, without MNP and with MNP differs. The second is to figure out how different factors influence willingness to churn in those situations. Finally, a classification model is proposed to categorize the subscribers who have willingness to churn or not. This study shows that the difference of willingness to churn before and after MNP. The results show that quality and price are the most influential factors in both cases. Inconvenience of changing numbers is additional factor in case of the unavailability of MNP. The results have implications particularly that mobile carriers should consider their quality of service and price more under the new situation

Detecting customer defections: an application of continuous duration models

The considerable increase of business competition in the Portuguese fixed telecommunications industry for the last decades has given rise to a phenomenon of customer defection, which has serious consequences for the business financial performance and, therefore, for the economy. As such, researchers have recognised the importance of an in-depth study of customer defection in different industries and geographic locations. This study aims to understand and predict customer lifetime in a contractual setting in order to improve the practice of customer portfolio management. A duration model is developed to understand and predict the residential customer defection in the fixed telecommunications industry in Portugal. The models are developed by using large-scale data from an internal database of a Portuguese company which presents bundled offers of ADSL, fixed line telephone, pay-TV and home-video. The model is estimated with a large number of covariates, which includes customer’s basic information, demographics, churn flag, customer historical information about usage, billing, subscription, credit, and other. The results of this study are very useful to the computation of the customer lifetime value