Modeling customers\u27 acquisition and retention of services from a multi-service provider

Though customer relationship management (CRM) has become a top priority in both practice and research, limited work has addressed CRM as it applies to contractual exchanges, such as those between customers of a cable service provider that offers different service packages. In this dissertation, I make two distinctions to segment the extant research and the managerial questions that they explore. First, I distinguish the literature that only considers retention from the research that jointly considers acquisition and retention. Second, I distinguish research involving a single service from that which considers multiple services. As a result of these demarcations, I carve out three distinct areas of research that effectively structure this dissertation: (1) retention of a single service, (2) acquisition and retention of a single service, and (3) acquisition and retention of multiple services. In each area, I contribute by developing an empirical model of customer behavior appropriate for the level of data available and to address relevant managerial problems. Using subscription data from a major telecommunications provider, I develop methodologies that can be used to (1) value customers\u27 subscription to a particular service, (2) assess the value of a prospective subscriber, and (3) determine the lifetime value of a subscriber, taking into account cross-buying of services. In addition, I discuss the implications of my findings to tasks such as resource allocation based on posterior estimates of customer value