Application of Machine Learning in Customer Churn Prediction

Retaining customers is the central component of a company's growth strategy. It is evident that several industries are experiencing a surge in customer churn due to the global pandemic. As a result, customer retention that lies at the core of customer relationship management, has become the foundation for every industry to plan for future growth. By reducing customer churn, a company can maximize its profit. Studies suggest that significant advancements are made in the field of customer churn prediction in domains like telecom, banking, e-commerce and energy sector. The focus of the paper is to present a detailed review of the various machine learning techniques applied to address churn. Fifty-five papers related to churn classification published between 2004 and 2020 are collected and analyzed. The reviewed papers are categorized into five main themes. These themes are feature selection techniques, methods to handle class imbalance, experimentation with machine learning algorithms, hybrid models and ensemble models respectively. Finally, few suggestions are presented as direction for future research.