Patent Application
20240403903
The present invention relates to predicting customer churn, and more particularly, to predicting customer churn from multi-product data using sequential deep learning (DL) modeling.
Churn is a metric that refers to customer turnover. Churn happens when a customer decides to stop using a product or service. The more customer churning that takes place, the more customers are leaving the business for a competitor. Thus, it is beneficial to build a machine learning model (or a churn model) that identifies when a customer may churn.
However, there are two major challenges-building a churn model and building a deep learning sequential model.
To build a churn model, a customer journey is created by taking into account multi-product data of a customer. This may include product usage, interactions through various channels, such as email, messages and voice messages, and customer attributes. Customer attributes include country, city, employee size, customer revenue size and industry.
Also, to build a churn model, events or activities early in the customer journey across different products must be considered. This may include trying to identify expressing desire for a particular feature earlier might be a cause for churn now.
Current churn models consume the data (e.g., events leading to churn). This may include activity counts, customer attributes, chat messages, sales emails and tickets in a non-sequential manner. Additionally, current churn models may also dilute the context of the customer journey because events are related to each other and there might be many reasons as to why one event happened after another. Further, it may be difficult to model sequential event usage patterns in software as a service (SaaS) for an account using classical machine learning (ML) models, since accounts are multi-agent systems where each agent exhibits different usage behaviors. Lastly, early churn detections are hard to accomplish with classical ML models.
Classical ML models, such as decision trees, support vector machines, and random forests, are primarily designed for static and independent data sets. These models generally make predictions based on a fixed set of input features without taking into account the temporal dependencies or the order of the data points. Classical ML models do not build relationships between the feature vectors across different timestamps of a customer journey. Hence, patterns embedded in the initial feature vectors cannot be effectively correlated to a churn event.
Most existing churn modeling systems are siloed in their approach, i.e., the systems do not consume data from different sources to get better context for a churn and non-churn event. Also, in the domain of sales, there is little to no work done on developing a sequence based churn model. Our invention focuses on developing a churn model which connects the events sequentially and also takes in data from different sources. Our method ensures that the model learns a holistic view of the customer's journey by looking at the actions of the customer across different products and links these actions through a sequence to accurately predict churn.
Thus, an improved technique to predict customer churn from multi-product data using sequential DL modeling may be beneficial.
Certain embodiments of the present invention may provide solutions to the problems and needs in the art that have not yet been fully identified, appreciated, or solved by current churn modeling technologies. For example, some embodiments of the present invention pertain to predicting customer churn from multi-product data using sequential modeling.
In an embodiment, a computer-implemented method for predicting churn from a multi-product data using sequential modeling includes collecting, by a journey module, data from a plurality of platforms to build a journey defined by one or more events. The method also includes creating, by a DL model, relationship data identifying between events in a chronological order, capturing temporal dependencies present in the data. The method further includes correlating, by a churn prediction module, sequences of events to a churn event, and identifying when the churn event is going to occur based on pattern learnt to differentiate between “churn” and “non-churn” journeys.
In another embodiment, a system includes memory comprising a set of instructions and at least one processor. The set of instructions are configured to cause the at least one processor to execute collecting, by a journey module, data from a plurality of platforms to build a journey defined by one or more events. The set of instructions are further configured to cause the at least one processor to execute creating, by a DL model, relationship data identifying between events in a chronological order, capturing temporal dependencies present in the data. The set of instructions are further configured to cause the at least one processor to execute correlating, by a churn prediction module, sequences of events to a churn event, and identifying when the churn event is going to occur based on pattern learnt to differentiate between “churn” and “non-churn” journeys.
In yet another embodiment, a non-transitory computer-readable medium comprising a computer program, the computer program causing at least one processor to execute collecting, by a journey module, data from a plurality of platforms to build a journey defined by one or more events. The computer program further causing at least one processor to execute creating, by a DL, relationship data identifying between events in a chronological order, capturing temporal dependencies present in the data. The computer program further causing at least one processor to execute correlating, by a churn prediction module, sequences of events to a churn event, and identifying when the churn event is going to occur based on pattern learnt to differentiate between “churn” and “non-churn” journeys.
In order that the advantages of certain embodiments of the invention will be readily understood, a more particular description of the invention briefly described above will be rendered by reference to specific embodiments that are illustrated in the appended drawings. While it should be understood that these drawings depict only typical embodiments of the invention and are not therefore to be considered to be limiting of its scope, the invention will be described and explained with additional specificity and detail through the use of the accompanying drawings, in which:
Some embodiments of the present invention pertain to predicting customer churn from multi-product data using sequential modeling.
Let's consider Freshsales® as a use case, in which a particular Freshworks® user performs activities across different product platforms. The user (or entity) may create leads and/or deals on Freshsales® for their customers. If the customer find an issue, the customer may raise one or more tickets on Freshdesk® or talk to a Freshworks® agents through Freshchat®, for example.
If the data available from one product were used to build context for a particular customer, there may not be sufficient data to generate a complete picture of the current state of the customer's journey.
Current churn prediction models in different products focus only on the information available from a particular product. For example, a churn production model for Freshdesk® is built using the information available from the one or more tickets. The churn prediction model for Freshsales® is built solely using the attributes from the Freshsales® product. The problem with this isolated approach is that any system that is built to predict churn does not have a holistic view of the customer journey, i.e., the various events that might have happened which affect churn.
Furthermore, the Freshsales® churn prediction model does not have access to the tickets raised by the customer in Freshdesk® just before the customer churned, which might bring in relevant context as to why the churn event happened. Likewise, the Freshdesk® churn prediction model does not have access to the Freshchat® messages or the activities in Freshsales® to accurately predict churn for the particular customer. The bottom line is that there is no bird's eye view of the customer journey that the model can learn for which results in building better context for churn.
Finally, churn prediction module 215 may correlate the sequences of events to the churn event and identify whether a particular customer is going to churn or not based on the patterns learnt to differentiate between “churn” and “non-churn” customer journeys.
To build a customer sequence, the counts of all customer activities is calculated as a weekly vector, and all the weekly vectors are arranged as a sequence of 24 weeks (˜6 months). Then, the sequences are passed through a LSTM architecture to predict whether the customer is going to churn. Every churned account may have weekly sequence vectors for each weekend date before the churn event.
LSTM network is a type of artificial neural network architecture that is commonly used in the field of deep learning. LSTMs addresses the limitations of traditional neural networks when it comes to handling sequential data, such as speech, text, and video. LSTMs use a special type of recurrent neural network (RNN) that remembers information for a long time and selectively forgets information that is no longer relevant. The key difference between an LSTM and a traditional RNN is the addition of memory cells and gating mechanisms. The memory cells allow the network to selectively store and access information over long periods of time, while the gating mechanisms control the flow of information into and out of the memory cells. LSTMs may be used for a wide range of applications, including natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and image captioning. LSTM may be effective in modeling complex temporal dependencies and handling vanishing and exploding gradient problems that can occur in traditional RNNs.
Initially, training of the model is performed. With training, the model learns the patterns that lead to churn. For example, historic data is fed from various platform in which the historic data represents events that have led to churn. In this example, there are N number of accounts, each of which have data over several weeks. For example, Account 1 has 52 weeks of data prior to the customer churning, and Account 2 has 24 weeks of data prior to the customer churning. When a customer churns, the churn flag is listed as 1, and all data associated with the churn event is fed into the model.
For a customer journey, weekly vectors are created. These weekly vectors comprise of:
Now when the model is learned, i.e., the model has received all of the patterns for each account, there is a new account, which may be an existing account of a user of a product. The pattern of usage for the new account is fed into the model, and the model is able to give a score between 0 and 100, which indicates that there is a probability of churning. For example, a pattern matching is performed between the patterns in the existing Account Z and the previously fed patterns of Accounts 1 . . . . N.
For some of the text features 415, which includes emails and chat messages, ML models only understands numbers 0s and 1s. For this reason, textual data is transformed into numerical sequence. For example, BERT™ model may help convert the text data into numerical sequences.
Numerical attributes 405, customer attributes 410 and text features 415, for each week (see
Bidirectional LSTM 425 is the ML model, which learns the model through the horizontal and vertical concatenation. Simply put, Bidirectional LSTM 425 learns the correlation between the data (i.e., customer interaction) and outcome (i.e., customer churn based on customer interaction).
Computing system 700 further includes a memory 715 for storing information and instructions to be executed by processor(s) 710. Memory 715 can be comprised of any combination of Random Access Memory (RAM), Read Only Memory (ROM), flash memory, cache, static storage such as a magnetic or optical disk, or any other types of non-transitory computer-readable media or combinations thereof. Non-transitory computer-readable media may be any available media that can be accessed by processor(s) 710 and may include volatile media, non-volatile media, or both. The media may also be removable, non-removable, or both.
Additionally, computing system 700 includes a communication device 720, such as a transceiver, to provide access to a communications network via a wireless and/or wired connection. In some embodiments, communication device 720 may be configured to use Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), Single Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA), Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), cdma2000, Wideband CDMA (W-CDMA), High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA), Long Term Evolution (LTE), LTE Advanced (LTE-A), 802.11x, Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Ultra-WideBand (UWB), 802.16x, 802.15, Home Node-B (HnB), Bluetooth, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Infrared Data Association (IrDA), Near-Field Communications (NFC), fifth generation (5G), New Radio (NR), any combination thereof, and/or any other currently existing or future-implemented communications standard and/or protocol without deviating from the scope of the invention. In some embodiments, communication device 720 may include one or more antennas that are singular, arrayed, phased, switched, beamforming, beamsteering, a combination thereof, and or any other antenna configuration without deviating from the scope of the invention.
Processor(s) 710 are further coupled via bus 705 to a display 725, such as a plasma display, a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), a Light Emitting Diode (LED) display, a Field Emission Display (FED), an Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) display, a flexible OLED display, a flexible substrate display, a projection display, a 4K display, a high definition display, a Retina® display, an In-Plane Switching (IPS) display, or any other suitable display for displaying information to a user. Display 725 may be configured as a touch (haptic) display, a three dimensional (3D) touch display, a multi-input touch display, a multi-touch display, etc. using resistive, capacitive, surface-acoustic wave (SAW) capacitive, infrared, optical imaging, dispersive signal technology, acoustic pulse recognition, frustrated total internal reflection, etc. Any suitable display device and haptic I/O may be used without deviating from the scope of the invention.
A keyboard 730 and a cursor control device 735, such as a computer mouse, a touchpad, etc., are further coupled to bus 705 to enable a user to interface with computing system. However, in certain embodiments, a physical keyboard and mouse may not be present, and the user may interact with the device solely through display 725 and/or a touchpad (not shown). Any type and combination of input devices may be used as a matter of design choice. In certain embodiments, no physical input device and/or display is present. For instance, the user may interact with computing system 700 remotely via another computing system in communication therewith, or computing system 700 may operate autonomously.
Memory 715 stores software modules that provide functionality when executed by processor(s) 710. The modules include an operating system 540 for computing system 700. The modules further include a churn prediction module 545 that is configured to perform all or part of the processes described herein or derivatives thereof. Computing system 700 may include one or more additional functional modules 750 that include additional functionality.
One skilled in the art will appreciate that a “system” could be embodied as a server, an embedded computing system, a personal computer, a console, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a cell phone, a tablet computing device, a quantum computing system, or any other suitable computing device, or combination of devices without deviating from the scope of the invention. Presenting the above-described functions as being performed by a “system” is not intended to limit the scope of the present invention in any way, but is intended to provide one example of the many embodiments of the present invention. Indeed, methods, systems, and apparatuses disclosed herein may be implemented in localized and distributed forms consistent with computing technology, including cloud computing systems.
It should be noted that some of the system features described in this specification have been presented as modules, in order to more particularly emphasize their implementation independence. For example, a module may be implemented as a hardware circuit comprising custom very large scale integration (VLSI) circuits or gate arrays, off-the-shelf semiconductors such as logic chips, transistors, or other discrete components. A module may also be implemented in programmable hardware devices such as field programmable gate arrays, programmable array logic, programmable logic devices, graphics processing units, or the like.
A module may also be at least partially implemented in software for execution by various types of processors. An identified unit of executable code may, for instance, include one or more physical or logical blocks of computer instructions that may, for instance, be organized as an object, procedure, or function. Nevertheless, the executables of an identified module need not be physically located together, but may include disparate instructions stored in different locations that, when joined logically together, comprise the module and achieve the stated purpose for the module. Further, modules may be stored on a computer-readable medium, which may be, for instance, a hard disk drive, flash device, RAM, tape, and/or any other such non-transitory computer-readable medium used to store data without deviating from the scope of the invention.
Indeed, a module of executable code could be a single instruction, or many instructions, and may even be distributed over several different code segments, among different programs, and across several memory devices. Similarly, operational data may be identified and illustrated herein within modules, and may be embodied in any suitable form and organized within any suitable type of data structure. The operational data may be collected as a single data set, or may be distributed over different locations including over different storage devices, and may exist, at least partially, merely as electronic signals on a system or network.
The process steps performed in
The computer program can be implemented in hardware, software, or a hybrid implementation. The computer program can be composed of modules that are in operative communication with one another, and which are designed to pass information or instructions to display. The computer program can be configured to operate on a general purpose computer, an ASIC, or any other suitable device.
It will be readily understood that the components of various embodiments of the present invention, as generally described and illustrated in the figures herein, may be arranged and designed in a wide variety of different configurations. Thus, the detailed description of the embodiments of the present invention, as represented in the attached figures, is not intended to limit the scope of the invention as claimed, but is merely representative of selected embodiments of the invention.
The features, structures, or characteristics of the invention described throughout this specification may be combined in any suitable manner in one or more embodiments. For example, reference throughout this specification to “certain embodiments,” “some embodiments,” or similar language means that a particular feature, structure, or characteristic described in connection with the embodiment is included in at least one embodiment of the present invention. Thus, appearances of the phrases “in certain embodiments,” “in some embodiment,” “in other embodiments,” or similar language throughout this specification do not necessarily all refer to the same group of embodiments and the described features, structures, or characteristics may be combined in any suitable manner in one or more embodiments.
It should be noted that reference throughout this specification to features, advantages, or similar language does not imply that all of the features and advantages that may be realized with the present invention should be or are in any single embodiment of the invention. Rather, language referring to the features and advantages is understood to mean that a specific feature, advantage, or characteristic described in connection with an embodiment is included in at least one embodiment of the present invention. Thus, discussion of the features and advantages, and similar language, throughout this specification may, but do not necessarily, refer to the same embodiment.
Furthermore, the described features, advantages, and characteristics of the invention may be combined in any suitable manner in one or more embodiments. One skilled in the relevant art will recognize that the invention can be practiced without one or more of the specific features or advantages of a particular embodiment. In other instances, additional features and advantages may be recognized in certain embodiments that may not be present in all embodiments of the invention.
One having ordinary skill in the art will readily understand that the invention as discussed above may be practiced with steps in a different order, and/or with hardware elements in configurations which are different than those which are disclosed. Therefore, although the invention has been described based upon these preferred embodiments, it would be apparent to those of skill in the art that certain modifications, variations, and alternative constructions would be apparent, while remaining within the spirit and scope of the invention. In order to determine the metes and bounds of the invention, therefore, reference should be made to the appended claims.
