We present and discuss the important business problem of estimating the effect of retention efforts on the Lifetime Value of a customer in the Telecommunications industry. We discuss the components of this problem, in particular customer value and length of service (or tenure) modeling, and present a novel segment-based approach, motivated by the segment-level view marketing analysts usually employ. We then describe how we build on this approach to estimate the effects of retention on Lifetime Value. Our solution has been successfully implemented in Amdocs' Business Insight (BI) platform, and we illustrate its usefulness in real-world scenarios.

We consider prediction-model evaluation in the context of marketing-campaign planning. In order to evaluate and compare models with specific campaign objectives in mind, we need to concentrate our attention on the appropriate evaluation-criteria. These should portray the model's ability to score accurately and to identify the relevant target population. In this paper we discuss some applicable model-evaluation and selection criteria, their relevance for campaign planning, their robustness under changing population distributions, and their employment when constructing confidence intervals. We illustrate our results with a case study based on our experience from several projects.