Churn analysis is a big and interesting application of Business Intelligence and that too in real-time!
Telecommunication companies are constantly looking at your calling patterns, changes in your plans, etc to guess whether you are about to switch your service from them to another provider. Especially with cell phone number portability this has become a big concern for a lot of telecommunication companies.
Even in countries like India where pre-paid cell phones outnumber post-paid (with an account), fall in calling patterns from a particular cell number may mean the consumer is about to switch to another carrier!
BSkyB is a large Television service provider in U.K (like Dish Network or DirectTV in the U.S, I am guessing). Here one of the IT representatives from BSkyB talks about how they are handling terabytes of consumer data to keep close track of consumer behavior patterns and guessing at churn that may happen with a particular customer.
They then make special offers to that customer with the hope that they can prevent the churn and keep the customer.
Predictive Analysis and its immediate application in real-time to keep a customer of make sure that a revenue stream is protected is a profoundly useful application for any company.
Personally, a lot of these services could do a better job offering the same special deals they offer NEW customers to their EXISTING LOYAL Customers, rather than deal with churn! But that's another rant for another blog, I guess!
The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears. - Bill Vaughan
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