Modelling customer lifetime value in contractual settings

Service provision is often governed by a contract (e.g., newspaper subscriptions, phone contracts, and credit agreements). Typically, such a contract includes rules that influence the dynamics of the customer in the marketplace. Typical examples are minimum contract durations, or fixed time instants for contract termination. The goal of these rules is to increase the future total profit gained from the customer, which is usually denoted with the term customer lifetime value (CLV). We analyse the problem of calculating the CLV under general contract structures. We show that classical Markov models for describing the customer dynamics are not appropriate and may lead to huge errors in the CLV. We propose a semi-Markov formulation which leads to substantially better results. We apply the framework to data of newspaper subscription.

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