A hybrid approach to predict churn

Acquiring new customers in any business is much more expensive than trying to keep the existing ones. As a result, many prediction algorithms have been proposed to detect churning customers. In this paper, the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) technique is brought to the attention of marketing researchers. We have applied OWA technique to improve the prediction accuracy of existing churn management systems. The decision lists of underlying prediction algorithms have been fused using OWA algorithm. Applied to the database of a telecommunication company, this method is found to significantly improve accuracy in predicting churn compared to the best existing result in the literature of the churn management. Our findings lead us to believe that using OWA technique could cause to increase profit for the companies.