Venn in Wonderland: Paper on Nested Venn Diagrams & Lewis Carroll Diagrams Available

I did a bit more work on those nested Venn Diagrams, including research that turned up an alternative to Venn Diagrams produced by Lewis Carroll, known naturally enough as Lewis Carroll Diagrams.

You may recognize the two-set version as the same structure used in the more recent "Boston Box".

It transpires that Carroll used nesting of his diagrams as far back as 1896. Here is his diagram for eight sets.

All this and more is described, with including the relationship to the Nested Venn Diagram I described in the previous post, in a paper entitled "Nested Venn Diagrams" from Stochastic Solutions.

Financial Services Retention White Paper Available

I've recently completed a counterpart to my white paper on retention in financial services—"Identifying who can be saved and who will be driven away by retention activity". It's a counterpart to the previous telecoms-focused white paper on the same theme. The new one focuses on the incremental impact of retention campaigns in financial services. The abstract is below.

Abstract

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that the very act of trying to ‘save’ some customers provokes them to leave. This is not hard to understand, for a key targeting criterion is usually estimated churn probability, and this is highly correlated with customer dissatisfaction. Often, it is mainly lethargy that is preventing a dissatisfied customer from actually leaving. Interventions designed with the express purpose of reducing customer loss can provide an opportunity for such dissatisfaction to crystallise, provoking or bringing forward customer departures that might otherwise have been avoided, or at least delayed. This is especially true when intrusive contact mechanisms, such as outbound calling, are employed. Retention programmes can be made more effective and more profitable by switching the emphasis from customers with a high probability of leaving to those likely to react positively to retention activity. This paper discusses how targeting on the basis of such ‘savability’ can be achieved, illustrating the effectiveness of the approach with case studies. Insofar as a paper can be summarised in a motto, this paper’s is “savability is the key to retention activity”.

It's available as a PDF download here (228K, no registration required).

Telecoms Retention White Paper Available

I've recently completed a white paper "Identifying who can be saved and who will be driven away by retention activity". It focuses on the incremental impact of retention campaigns in telecommunications, with a particular focus on the mobile/cellular sector.

Abstract

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that the very act of trying to ‘save’ some customers provokes them to leave. This is not hard to understand, for a key targeting criterion is usually estimated churn probability, and this is highly correlated with customer dissatisfaction. Often, it is mainly lethargy that is preventing a dissatisfied customer from actually leaving. Interventions designed with the express purpose of reducing customer loss can provide an opportunity for such dissatisfaction to crystallise, provoking or bringing forward customer departures that might otherwise have been avoided, or at least delayed. This is especially true when intrusive contact mechanisms, such as outbound calling, are employed. Retention programmes can be made more effective and more profitable by switching the emphasis from customers with a high probability of leaving to those likely to react positively to retention activity. This paper discusses how targeting on the basis of such ‘savability’ can be achieved, illustrating the effectiveness of the approach with case studies. Insofar as a paper can be summarised in a motto, this paper’s is “savability is the key to retention activity”.

It's available as a PDF download here (232K, no registration required).