How To Reduce Churn? | Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty [Part 3]

How To Reduce Churn? | Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty [Part 3]

   November 10, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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How to Reduce churn?

Is it possible to reverse the effects of the churn phenomena?

Many questions can be asked about this issue, and many experts do an amazing job in fighting churn and turning any angry customer into a happy and satisfied one.

In this part of the series "Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty, we will talk about some practical ways for reducing the churn rate.

This is not the only recipe for success but I will go a long way into saving customers that will potentially leave you for a competitor.

Analyze !

This can seem very obvious. Any company needs to find out the main reason (or reasons) making its customers leave.

The easiest way to get some "on the surface" information is simple:

Talk to the customers!

Call your customers. No emails or anonymous surveys.

This personal touch will demonstrate how much you care about them and it will give a personal and caring touch to the "soulless” Business-Client relationship.

But there is a trick here: You should not call each and every customer. This method is meant to just scratch the surface and get some insight directly from the people making money for the company.

There are 3 main questions that you need to ask and that you need to get as much information about them as you possibly can:

1. Why did they leave?
2. What did they think about the service or product when they first became customers and what do they think now?
3. What was the only little thing that could have prevented them from leaving if it was provided?

This valuable "Microscopic" feedback will serve you very well in quickly evaluating the direction of your retention strategy and the fast actions you need to take immediately (the 3rd question is the answer)

Engage !

The second thing that can help you prevent customer churn is to engage your customers with your product.

Give your customers reasons to keep coming back . This can be as simple as day-to-day tips and help about your product and services.

This kind of engagement can be achieved by providing full and clear information and content about the most important functionalities and uses of your product or service. Regular updates are very appreciated, about special offers, new functionalities...etc.

You can do it using the email channel (but please do not abuse it ! ) On your website, social media pages and after any support call made by the customer .

Educate !

This point is correlated with the above point. You have to provide enough good quality material about your products and services to your customers. 

The 500 pages user guide and the endless self-help section of your website will hurt you even more.

Education here is divided into two categories: Education about your product features and education about the market and how well your product is positioned compared to the competition.

Phrases like: “The fastest internet in the market” or  “The best camera in the world “…etc. are very attractive for customers.

But you should of course have the Best product, or everything I am saying here wont matter.

Know !

There is always a subset of  your beloved customers that is more likely to go away than others .And as a business, you should know these customers even before they think of leaving you so you can act immediately and retain them.

Identifying customers that are very close to the “risky” edge is not so complicated.  For me personally I believe that the first sign of a customer at risk of churning is a voiced complaint. Customers that care enough about your product or service will contact you and start complaining when they feel that they are not getting their money’s worth.

Building complex churn prediction models is a deeper way of looking at this problem. But here I am trying to find the points any company can handle very quickly.

These things can be done in less than 24 hours, and the results are fast and easy to measure.

Define !

Not all customers have the same value to us. I am not saying this to minimize the value of each and every customer. But let’s be real, the Pareto principle apply in every Business situation.

We all know the situation where 80% of your revenue is generated by 20% or less of your total customers. As a smart Business, those 20% should be treated in a very special way.

Priority in customer support, complementary features and free benefits, invitations to special events or exclusive product releases are all things that are easily implemented and can have a huge positive impact in reducing the churn value on your revenue.

Offer !

Another Way to do things is to offer very interesting but simple incentives to all your customers based on their life time value, tenure and other customer related information

In the other hand, you have to be aware of what you are offering. You should not in any case cannibalize your revenue by giving free stuff that the customer could have paid money to get.

Give !

Obvious?

Yes it is very obvious for me to say this. But many business put this at the bottom of their priorities.

No matter how much cost and investment you will put into it, improving your services and the quality of your product will be an automatic churn prevention tool.

Pay Attention !

Complaints are like tips of the icebergs – they suggest that the bigger part of the problem is hidden from your view. Did you know that 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain, and 91% of those will simply leave and never come back?

So, you’d better take complaints seriously and act on them, and in this way prevent customer churn, because, as Strauss & Seidel claims, dissatisfied 

Finally:

It is your job to make your customers happy and satisfied. It is your job to improve the quality of your product or service and it is your job to make sure that all the above points are treated with care and all churn prevention actions are prioritized!

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Customer Segmentation: Revealing the mystery

Customer Segmentation: Revealing the mystery

   October 23, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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Every company has a different product and provides a different service to a particular set of customers.

Customers pick a company for a particular reason: convenient prices, better product or service quality, brand name and reputation, more benefits and advantages…etc.

These customers can be of different types and natures some are individuals, companies, governments or various types of organizations but the reasons of choosing their service provider or the product they are willing to buy can vary from customer to customer.

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Why Customers Leave You? | Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty [Part 2]

Why Customers Leave You? | Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty [Part 2]

   October 07, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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Why Customers Leave You?

We started this series with the first part, to talk about churn and the current status of this phenomena worldwide in thirst part of this series " Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty [Part 1] " .

In an intensely competitive market, customers receive multiple incentives to change their telecom provider and encounter multiple disincentives to stay.
There are many reasons to leave a provider but there might be just one single reason to stay.

Good Customer service, Loyalty and attachment to the Brand and great experience are some of the main reasons for customers to stay on

Leaving the current provider is not always a final decision. It is not always the end of the relationship, there are multiple ways a telco company can save these dissatisfied customer, even one day before they decide to leave.
We will talk about these final-steps to saving customer in the next part of this series .

Let's start by some of the main reasons a telecom customer might leave their current provider to a competitor:

Price: 

Particularly in the voice and long-distance/international calls markets, telco providers offer attractive and aggressive promotions, such as relatively low monthly fees, high-volume offerings (fixed number of minutes at a reasonable fee per month), and low rates per-minute.

These price incentives can provide residential customers, in particular, with powerful incentives to change carriers.

Promotions and counter promotions are one of the causes of rotational churn, when a customer leaves a provider to another one, and after a while goes back.
This happen when company A starts a good promotion on Roaming for example, so the customer who is planning to travel will change providers during their travel duration.

Once this customer gets back, they will find an much attractive local-minutes pack from their old provider, so as a results, they will again switch providers.


Service quality: 

The service here is the lack of network connection capabilities or quality in some or in most of the places where the customer requires service.

These network issues can cause customers to abandon their current provider in favor of one with broader reach or a more robust network.

It is known that improving network capacity and upgrading the equipment can present a very high investment cost to any telco company, but on the long term, these non-invested costs can make the same company lose much higher revenues due to customers escaping them and going to the competition that have a better network quality.

As a customer, I wouldn't care about the saturation or the additional constraints that my provider is having in my area. Any customer would only care about their internet speed and the voice quality they have when they make a call.

A good telco company is a company the services of which are so good, that the customer would not notice all the technological effort and investment the provider has put into improving the network.

If a customer starts noticing that data speed is slower from 7pm till midnight, this is the beginning of the end for the relationship.



Fraud: 

Fraud goes both ways: when a customer tries to benefit from services using illegal or immoral methods, and when the companies advertise and sell misleading services to the customers.

The second point is where the telecom company is doing it wrong. We all can understand that market pressure, economic and financial circumstances can put any company at a moral and ethical dilemma.
But false advertisement is where the companies hurt themselves.

Imagine a company selling data packs for a certain amount of money X $, which is way below the market price. The general public would see this as an opportunity and everyone will try to jump into it.

But what this company does not say clearly in the ads, is that this data pack comes with limited speed,  and it is not available during certain hours. They also don't say that if you consume more than 1GB, they will cut you off, until the next day.

As a customer, what would you think? This was definitely a scam and we would have appreciated that all of these conditions were clearly mentioned.


The first point is the most common of them all, it is when customers attempt to “game the system”.
These attempts vary in all kinds and shapes, and customers are very creative in finding ways for getting freebies and extra services.

I will not present any example of customer fraud here. But what these companies should do is analyze and understand all parts of their offers and services, and find all the loopholes and issues. This way they can minimize all possible fraud attempts and manage to only keep loyal and faithful customers on board.



Lack of carrier responsiveness: 

From a personal experience, this issue is a deal breaker when it comes to customer churn! Customer service is the most common touch-point with the market and the feedback telecom companies can get from this channel is a key for improving and enhancing their products and services.

but slow or no response to customer complaints is a sure path to a customer relations disaster.  No one with the right mind would bother themselves calling into customer support just to make a fake complaint. A call to customer services is a loud cry for  help and not just a bored customer wanting to make small talk.

Broken promises, long hold times when the customer reports problems, and multiple complaints related to the same issue are sure to lead to customer churn.




Brand disloyalty (or loyalty to another): 

Some issues that came when giant telecom groups bought a wide portfolio of other telecom companies around the world, is the re-branding challenge.

Some of these companies managed this transition smoothly and gained a lot of momentum and attracted many new opportunities.

But some of the re-branding operations were a total failure on many levels. Causing the company a major lost in customers due to nationalist feelings associated with people only wanting to support a national provider, or rumors that this re-branding might cost locals their jobs... etc

Telecom companies should always pay attention to their brand and make people feel proud to be a part of their family of customers. Just think of how Apple is doing. It's okay to copy and replicate successful stories.


Privacy concerns: 

With the advancement of technology and the evolution of public opinion about privacy , now consumers have an increasing awareness that all the companies they deal with have a lot of information about them.

These companies know their consumption habits,  spendings, personal financial information, health information... etc.

Breaking of privacy promises, publicized privacy problems, telemarketing, and other issues are causing many customers to consider their personal privacy as an asset and they are holding their service providers responsible for keeping privacy promises.

This usually happens when a telecom provider starts sending unsolicited sms campaigns about non-telecom products and services, like clothes and air tickets...

Customers will think that their provider has sold their information to a third party company and they are being spammed.


Lack of features: 

The lack of feature can also be related to the lack of new services and products. The example of the new iPhone being sold by one provider and not the other can cause a customer to go to the company selling that device.

Customers may switch carriers for features not provided by their current carrier. This might include the inability of a particular carrier to be the “one-stop shop” for the entire customer’s Communications needs.

Not being able to transfer credit, or to have a motivational loyalty program is something customer will see available in other companies and they will always go to the provider giving its customer the best packaged deal in the market.


New technology or product introduced by competitors: 

It has started with the introduction of 3G, and then 4G. High speed data has cause the late-adopters a significant loss of customer base because people will always prefer to have the best offer in the market.

Telecom companies always present new services based on technological advancements. This is why the customer started to get educated about all these different terms and acronyms like 4G,LTE VoIP..etc

New technologies such as high-speed data or bundled high-value service offerings—create significant opportunities for carriers to entice competitors’ customers to switch.


New competitors enter the market:

The mere existence of viable competitors to the incumbent carrier may cause certain disloyal customers to churn. Further, as competitors enter new markets, they often offer short- or long-term incentives to new subscribers to build market share.

The new providers to the already-saturated market will always offer discounts, and lower price tags for the new customer. These companies will get very aggressive in their communication startegy in order to attract as much customers as they can.



Billing or service disputes: 

And this might be the biggest of all of them: Billing errors, incorrectly applied payments, and disputes about service disruptions can cause customers to switch carriers.

No customer would accept to pay for more than what they consumed. Telecom companies should know that customers are well aware of all the prices, and they follow and monitor their consumption levels. So any billing issues and miscalculations or any added fees will make a dissatisfied customer.

Depending on the situations, such churn may be avoidable by always doing checks and regularly following customer complaints about their bills and charges.
A proper apology and a complete refund will go a long way in case of an error.



All the points mentioned above are just some of the major issues that can cause customer churn.

So the question here is:

How to Fight and Reduce the Churn rate?

In the next part, i will talk about ways to fight and reduce the churn rate.

Your comments and feedback are always welcomed! I also love to hear any suggestions about future topic I can cover here.

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What is Churn? | Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty [Part 1]

What is Churn? | Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty [Part 1]

   October 07, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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In this series of posts, we will talk about a very important economic and technological field of our global economy. A field that has entered every house and its services has been irreplaceable in our daily lives, just like water and food:  it is the telecommunication sector.

Part 1: Context of Churn in Telco Companies.[This part]
Part 2: Reasons Of Churn.
Part 3: How to Fight and Reduce Churn.
Part 4: How to Build Customer Loyalty.


This field has been the driver of innovation, technological advancements and it has set the trend of how people go about their daily lives for the past 10 to 15 years.

It is known that telecommunication industry is one of the fastest and most profitable industries in the world. Most of the 7 billion humans on our planet (as much as  90% of the world population according to some studies) have access to the basic telecom services, and enjoy the benefits of communication and internet at a speed that is getting faster and faster every day.

With the daily advances in technology, More and more telco companies are envading new markets.


the telecommunication sector is one of the fastest growing industries with 90% of the world's population using telecoms services  . The rapid growth of telecom users worldwide is also accompanied with increase in number of telecom providers, leading to fierce competition in this market.

Moreover the introduction of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) and dongle use in various countries has also facilitated an easier mode for a customer to switch to another provider.

Churn has been a subject of discussion for a while now, and it has become the main reason for telco companies to create new products and to attract new customers. But it has become the reason to start doing "base management" in order to keep existing customers happy and satisfied.

The world rates vary as different companies within different countries have different churn rates.

Companies lose at least 20 to 25% of their customers from one year to another. If no new customers are acquired then the average lifetime of an existing customer is equal to 1/c, where c is the annual rate of churn.

For the company with 25% churn, this means an average lifetime of 4 years for the customer, whereas a churn rate of 50% has 2 years lifetime value .These numbers are very important for the telecom company to understand and monitor.


Recent reports on worldwide mobile churn state that the loyalty of a mobile customer has fallen to an all time low, with an average customer now switching provider every 27 months. This particular number tells a lot about the dynamism of the telco sector worldwide.

This average is more than twice as frequently as a decade ago.

I should mention that Churn happens in both directions, to and from the telecom operator.  For example,  the introduction of mobile internet (That is served via modems) makes it easier for a customer to switch from one provider to another provider, and this led to a very high rate of rotational churn.

This switching is referred to as customer churn. Some of the causes of customer churn are switching costs, bad network quality and customer financial status.

Because of competition in the communications sector, Mobile internet operators are finding it very tough to keep their existing customers and they are losing their customers to competition. Churn is a global phenomena . Every telecommunication company is experiencing the problem of customer churn.

The introduction of new telecom providers has stiffened the competition. The focus of telco  companies has shifted from building a large customer base into keeping customers in house.


Churn is often treated like a seasonal flu: telco companies's management assume the root cause of the problem can be eliminated and that the best it can hope for is to minimize its symptoms. I will try in this series of posts to prove that churn causes are not some seasonal effects, and if the problems do not get resolved, it will cause a long-term effect of the company's performance and existence in the market.

So the first question we should ask is:

Why Customers Leave You?

To know the main reasons that can drive customers away, check the second part of "Fighting Churn and Building Loyalty [Part 2] .

Your comments and feedback are always welcomed! I also love to hear any suggestions about future topic I can cover here.

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Proud to be a STATISTICIAN !

Proud to be a STATISTICIAN !

   September 09, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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I am one of those people who take pride in what they do!

Doing things no one expects me to do, accomplishing very hard challenges, raising the bar so high!

I MAKE NUMBERS TALK! I can do magic!

I have never been more proud of the things that I have learnt and the things I do!

I love MATH, I really do

I also Love computer Science, and programming..

Being a statistician is the ultimate adventure.. where you can go everywhere you want, work on any project you like, and impress people with the untold stories of their data..

But to top it all up, I love to mix all of that with a lot of love for real world challenges !

Damn it! Im a ROCK STAR!


STATISTICIAN and Proud!


Wajdi Ben Saad

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Linkin Park: Analyzing the causes of death of Rock band members

Linkin Park: Analyzing the causes of death of Rock band members

   July 30, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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Being a part of the Y generation, I grew up listening to various types and genres of music, from Rap to RnB, to Rock and electronic music.

I was personally choked to hear about the death of the lead singer of the Linkin Park band. Their music was and still is popular until today.

The news was as choking to me as to anyone else who knew that band. After knowing about the news, I had a discussion about this tragedy , and a question popped up about the fact that rock band members mostly die of suicide or drug over-dose.

I wasn't really sure that this information is true, so I really couldn't have a real argument to say that it is maybe (or not ) the most commun reason of death for Rock stars.

And since I love playing with data, I decided to fact-check the hypothesis stating that:

 "The most commun cause of death among rock band members is suicide" .

To start, we have to get  some data! and since there is no available data-set to analyse , I had to be creative and scrape this information from the web.

Fortunately I was able to extract about 4000 recorded death cases of Rock band members, with detailed information about them. I will take more time to explain how I did that in a separate article.

Linkin Park Band

What I am interested in now is the analysis of the causes of death, and verifying if suicide and drug over-dose are the most commun causes of death among rock band members. So I will be doing some exploratory analysis on the data that I had.

But before I talk about the data, I'd like to have an overview of the Rock music world, just to be able to put things into perspective later on.

According to this precious Wikipedia information page , Rock music is a genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the early 1950s,

It has almost 400+ different varieties and sub-genres.

The main instruments used in rock music are guitars ,drums and keyboards.

And ever since it emerged, and also nowadays, Rock artists have experimented with many other musical instruments and have included them as a main tool for Rock music, such as violon and saxophones.

And we cannot omit that rock music was always and foremost centered around the vocal contributions of singers and deep engaged lyrics of the songs. Even thou there are different types of Rock music that does not involve philosophical concepts and meaningful lyrics.

AC-DC Live, Rock or Bust tour

Now let's get to business :

The data has been extracted from the web, I have been lucky to get almost 4000 record of death for rock band members all over the world.

The data is certainly not complete ,nor covers all bands and recorded and unrecorded deaths, But an analysis of this available data-set would give us an overview of the general trend.

The Deaths of Rock band members 

• By Country of Origin:

Before jumping into the analysis, I should clarify that I have had data for 96 different countries, but for the sake of simplifying the analysis, I have always kept the top 10 countries in order of magnitude of the count of Rock band members.

Below the bar-plot show us that the most important number of deaths occurred in the United stated, and this is very normal since the most important number of bands are originated from the US.

Here are the top 10 countries with the highest number of deaths.The USA accounts for 1129 death cases, after that we find Germany, which is a country that has a large number of rock bands, but having 5 times less cases of deaths, with only 206 recorded deaths of rock band members.

• By Role in the Band:

We all might think that the Drummers are the angriest of all Rock band members, that they like to hit stuff since they are always with sticks beating downs the drums for rythme.

But the below bar-plot proves that Guitarist are the ones who are most likely to die, with 1007 death cases, followed by Vocalist with 784 cases.

According to this graph, the safest role in a rock band is the Keyboard player, with only 80 recorded deaths (again, this is always according to the available data I managed to scrape off the web)

• By Country and Role:

Here we mix up tow information, the country of origin and the role in the band. You can see that the Guitarist are most likely to die if the are from the USA. Guitarist are always more likely to die in all the countries.

• By Cause of Death:

Now, we come to the most interesting part of this project, what are the most commun causes of death among rock band members?

As you can see in the 2 graphs below, health problems is the #1 cause of death. followed by accidents.

Suicide and Overdoses are in the third and fifth place as the most commun death reasons.

As you can see, Health issues are the number one cause of death, with 984 recorded deaths. suicide is only accountable for 358 cases, and drug-alcohol overdose have 102 cases.

Murder is the fourth most commun death reason with 110 cases. rock band members have been recorded to be victimes of various murder and homicide cases in the past years.

Various types of accidents were recorded, car crashes, motorcycle crashes and even helicopter crashes ! ( RIP to Dmitriy Donskoy, a Drummers from the band "Deathonator" from,Russia).

So as you can see, health problems and accidents account for more than half of the death causes for rock band members. 

It is safe to say that rock band members might not be the most athletic or health-conscious people on earth, but while analyzing the data, many of the health issues included illnesses that could have been treated and prevented .

Below a list of the detailed causes of death.

• Suicide Deaths:

So lets see what are the types or suicide used by rock band members. As you can see in the below table, there are 271 cases where the type of suicide or the tools used are not specified. But the most commun way is by hanging.

Conclusion

After this curiosity-driven project, I can now say that suicide and overdoses are NOT the most commun cause of death of rock band members.

The misconceptions people have are always related to the nature of thing they are thinking about.

A natural death is not as choking as a suicide case, and it does not make people talk about it in a very tragic way.

I hope you find this work interesting, and please get in touch and give me your comments!

This little work has been both fun, and sad for me. It is hard to go through all these rockers and musicians, to know how they died and to listen to their music and feel sorry for their death.

I will leave you with this music video from Linkin Park... RIP Chester

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Capitaliser sur la "Richesse" de vos données [Partie 1/4]

Capitaliser sur la "Richesse" de vos données [Partie 1/4]

   July 10, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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Les technologies de Big Data, de l'analyse de données et des modèles prédictifs sont devenues maintenant les "must-have" de toutes les entreprises dans le monde.

Les CEO et directeurs observent avec admiration comment Google, Facebook, Airbnb et d'autres sociétés sont entrain de révolutionner leur domaines avec les algorithmes d'intelligence artificielle ,de machine learning et du "Deep Learning".

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Economie Tunisienne: Etat des lieux

Economie Tunisienne: Etat des lieux

   February 13, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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Introduction

la Tunisie vivait une situation économique très difficile depuis une période de 5 ans,  chaque fois qu’on croit toucher le fond, les choses empirent davantage.

Un dinar en chute libre, des exportations en recul et des investissements qui n'avancent plus : c'est le constat global établi depuis 2011.

Nous allons essayer dans cet article de détailler quelques chiffres clés afin de donner une image plus consistante et plus claire sur l’état des lieux de l'économie Tunisienne.

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5 priorités pour le prochain gouvernement

5 priorités pour le prochain gouvernement

   February 13, 2017       Wajdi Ben Saad

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La Tunisie avait toujours le label du "petit" pays, avec peu de ressources et de moyens. Ce label était une sorte d'excuse ou d'argument pour justifier la lenteur du développement du pays et les difficultés rencontrées lors de la mise en place des programmes d'amélioration dans tous les secteurs.

Mais ce n'est pas VRAI, la Tunisie n'est pas un petit pays, sa superficie est supérieure à ces pays : Autriche, Émirats arabes unis, Irlande ,Denmark, Pays-Bas, Suisse, Kuwait..

Nous avons plus de ressources humaines que ces pays:

Belgique, Autriche, Suisse,Émirats arabes unis, Finlande,Norvège,Luxembourg..

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