CHAPTER 6
How Long Will Customers Last? Survival Analysis to Understand Customers and Their Value
How long will a lightbulb last? Which factors influence a cancer patient’s prognosis? What is the average time to failure (MTTF) of a disk drive? These questions may seem to have little relationship to each other, but they do have one thing in common: They all involve estimating time to an event, so they can be answered using survival analysis. And, these ideas apply to customers, their tenures, and their value.
The scientific and industrial origins of survival analysis explain the terminology. Its emphasis on “failure” and “risk” and “mortality” and “recidivism” may explain why, once upon a time, survival analysis did not readily catch on in the business and marketing world. That time has passed, and survival analysis is recognized as a powerful set of analytic techniques for understanding customers. And, the combination of...