Churn Reduction Project
At the end of 2016 and early 2017, Drakelow Consulting joined a project team to investigate the causes of churn experienced by a major non-UK telco offering Fixed Voice, Broadband, Mobile and TV. The responsibilities given to Drakelow Consulting included the study of customer data across a number of dimensions, requiring hypothesis testing to determine the causes of churn. This research was incorporated into a factual report.
Drakelow Consulting also had responsibility for critiquing the churn prediction model, based on machine learning, against best practice. Improvement opportunities were identified covering data integrity, new variable inclusion, model structure, and model selection criteria, which significantly improved the model's predictive ability. Further, contact centre performance was studied, with opportunities identified to reduce abandonment levels through improved forecasting and planning processes.
Drakelow Consulting identified a number of quick wins and also long term actions to reduce customer churn, and developed them into a detailed plan. All of the quick wins were placed into a model to estimate impact on churn, together with the cumulative effect on the future base sizes by product.
Business Modelling within an education business
Drakelow Consulting offered modelling services to a business improvement project within a large, global education business. The project focused on a US-based operational centre, performing inbound & outbound calls, email and webchat. The analysis work involved understanding client processes, studying data from a number of sources, and demonstrating improvement opportunities.
A resource model was created by Drakelow Consulting, which calculated the resource requirement for the existing setup. A number of scenarios were loaded into the model in stages, based on the identified improvements, which revealed cost savings. Since the business is anticipating large growth, the project laid out a route suggesting how growth could be achieved with little change to actual resource levels, thus improving profitability significantly.
Home Shopping Budget Support
Drakelow Consulting was hired by a leading home shopping business to support the Customer Services budget planning process for the financial year 2016/17. This involved identifying all of the input assumptions required, and working with the client analysts to obtain all of the information required. Phil Stubbs led consensus-building meetings to ensure that the budget assumptions used were achievable yet challenging, and fully critiqued by the local management team.
The result was a resource model from which the subsequent financial year’s cost could be estimated. It contained a full audit trail, since it included all of the business assumptions and performance targets.
Within the project, Phil also advised the client’s analysts on how to use a statistical technique called multiple regression to determine which factors best explain variation in the call volume from new customer campaigns.