O aumento da competição global tem aumentado os custos associados à atração de novos consumidores, impondo às empresas o desafio de mudar sua forma de atuação perante seus exigentes consumidores a fim de mantê-los. Diante desse desafio, este trabalho visa aprofundar o estudo do relacionamento entre a empresa e o cliente, identificando em que consiste o gerenciamento de churn e seu papel para a melhoria de ações de marketing para reter clientes. No intuito de alcançar o objetivo proposto, realizou-se uma pesquisa bibliográfica sobre o assunto, seguida de uma pesquisa de campo com abordagem qualitativa do tipo exploratória a partir de estudos de casos múltiplos em organizações de serviços do setor de telecomunicações no Brasil. A pesquisa de campo foi norteada pelo protocolo que abordou, entre outros pontos, os critérios de escolha dos casos, o roteiro de entrevistas e a forma de análise dos dados coletados. A escolha do setor foi motivada tanto por sua representatividade em nível nacional e internacional, quanto pelas mudanças que vem enfrentando na sua estrutura de competição, principalmente após os processos de privatização. Além disso, a indústria de telecomunicações é especialmente rica para este estudo, visto que suas empresas estão especialmente voltadas ao gerenciamento do churn. Os resultados obtidos ajudaram a compreender o processo de gerenciamento de churn, como este está inserido na gestão das empresas e suas aplicações. Nota-se seu papel no auxilio à identificação dos consumidores mais propensos a abandonar a empresa, assim como daqueles que ela deseja atrair e reter para ser capaz de desenvolver práticas eficientes e lucrativas. As limitações deste trabalho são fundamentalmente associadas à metodologia da pesquisa de campo. Além disso, colocam-se como possibilidades para desdobramentos futuros a condução de pesquisas quantitativas que visem testar, mensurar e avaliar os resultados do gerenciamento e pesquisas para compreender o impacto ambiental em suas práticas e resultados. / The rise in global competition has increased costs related to attracting new consumers, bringing companies the challenge of changing their behavior towards their ever more demanding clients in order to keep them. To assist in this challenge, this paper aims to deepen the studies regarding the company and the client, identifying what is considered churn management and its role to improve marketing actions to capture clients. With the aim of achieving the proposed goal, a bibliographic research was conducted as well as a qualitative field research in the exploratory type, which through multiple case studies, in organizations of the telecommunications sector, within Brazilian context. The field research was directed by a protocol and approached the criteria to choose the cases to be studied, the interviewing script and the form of analysis of the information gathered. The choice for this sector was driven for its national and international representation as well as for the changes the sector has been undergoing especially after its privatization. Moreover, the sector is specially recommended for the study as its companies are especially concerned with churn management. The obtained results helped understand the churn management process and how this is input in business administration and its applications. We can note its role in helping to identify consumers who are more likely to abandon the company and to identify the consumers the company wishes to attract and capture to be able to develop the necessary actions. The limitations of this paper are relative to the methodology of the field research. Besides this, conducting quantitative research which aims to test, measure and evaluate the results of management as well as to comprehend the environmental impact, the business model in practice and its results is considered for future studies.

Abstract As deregulation and new competitors open up the telecommunications industry, the cellular phone market has become more competitive than ever. To survive or maintain an advantage in such a competitive marketplace, many telecommunications companies are turning to data mining techniques to resolve such challenging issues as fraud detection, customer retention, and prospect profiling. In this thesis, we focused on developing and applying data mining technique to support the churn prediction. Constrained by limited customer profiles and general demographics, the proposed approach applied a decision tree induction technique (i.e., C4.5) to discover a classification model for churn predication solely based on the call records. To deal with the training data with a highly skewed distribution on decisions (i.e., around 2% churners and 98% non-churners), a multi-expert strategy was adopted. The empirical results showed that the proposed technique was effective in predicting at-risk cellular phone customers (i.e., potential churners). The proposed technique could identify 50.64% churners by selecting 10.03% of the population, and 68.62% churners by selecting 29.00% of the population.

O aumento da competição global tem aumentado os custos associados à atração de novos consumidores, impondo às empresas o desafio de mudar sua forma de atuação perante seus exigentes consumidores a fim de mantê-los. Diante desse desafio, este trabalho visa aprofundar o estudo do relacionamento entre a empresa e o cliente, identificando em que consiste o gerenciamento de churn e seu papel para a melhoria de ações de marketing para reter clientes. No intuito de alcançar o objetivo proposto, realizou-se uma pesquisa bibliográfica sobre o assunto, seguida de uma pesquisa de campo com abordagem qualitativa do tipo exploratória a partir de estudos de casos múltiplos em organizações de serviços do setor de telecomunicações no Brasil. A pesquisa de campo foi norteada pelo protocolo que abordou, entre outros pontos, os critérios de escolha dos casos, o roteiro de entrevistas e a forma de análise dos dados coletados. A escolha do setor foi motivada tanto por sua representatividade em nível nacional e internacional, quanto pelas mudanças que vem enfrentando na sua estrutura de competição, principalmente após os processos de privatização. Além disso, a indústria de telecomunicações é especialmente rica para este estudo, visto que suas empresas estão especialmente voltadas ao gerenciamento do churn. Os resultados obtidos ajudaram a compreender o processo de gerenciamento de churn, como este está inserido na gestão das empresas e suas aplicações. Nota-se seu papel no auxilio à identificação dos consumidores mais propensos a abandonar a empresa, assim como daqueles que ela deseja atrair e reter para ser capaz de desenvolver práticas eficientes e lucrativas. As limitações deste trabalho são fundamentalmente associadas à metodologia da pesquisa de campo. Além disso, colocam-se como possibilidades para desdobramentos futuros a condução de pesquisas quantitativas que visem testar, mensurar e avaliar os resultados do gerenciamento e pesquisas para compreender o impacto ambiental em suas práticas e resultados. / The rise in global competition has increased costs related to attracting new consumers, bringing companies the challenge of changing their behavior towards their ever more demanding clients in order to keep them. To assist in this challenge, this paper aims to deepen the studies regarding the company and the client, identifying what is considered churn management and its role to improve marketing actions to capture clients. With the aim of achieving the proposed goal, a bibliographic research was conducted as well as a qualitative field research in the exploratory type, which through multiple case studies, in organizations of the telecommunications sector, within Brazilian context. The field research was directed by a protocol and approached the criteria to choose the cases to be studied, the interviewing script and the form of analysis of the information gathered. The choice for this sector was driven for its national and international representation as well as for the changes the sector has been undergoing especially after its privatization. Moreover, the sector is specially recommended for the study as its companies are especially concerned with churn management. The obtained results helped understand the churn management process and how this is input in business administration and its applications. We can note its role in helping to identify consumers who are more likely to abandon the company and to identify the consumers the company wishes to attract and capture to be able to develop the necessary actions. The limitations of this paper are relative to the methodology of the field research. Besides this, conducting quantitative research which aims to test, measure and evaluate the results of management as well as to comprehend the environmental impact, the business model in practice and its results is considered for future studies.

The thesis "Actual role of knowledge discovery in databases˝ is concerned with churn prediction in mobile telecommunications. The issue is based on real data of a telecommunication company and it covers all steps of data mining process. In accord with the methodology CRISP-DM, the work looks thouroughly at the following stages: business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modeling, evaluation and deployment. As far as a system for knowledge discovery in databases is concerned, the tool IBM SPSS Modeler was selected. The introductory chapter of the theoretical part familiarises the reader with the issue of so called churn management, which comprises the given assignment; the basic concepts related to data mining are defined in the chapter as well. The attention is also given to the basic types of tasks of knowledge discovery of databasis and algorithms that are pertinent to the selected assignment (decision trees, regression, neural network, bayesian network and SVM). The methodology describing phases of knowledge discovery in databases is included in a separate chapter, wherein the methodology of CRIPS-DM is examined in greater detail, since it represents the foundation for the solution of our practical assignment. The conclusion of the theoretical part also observes comercial or freely available systems for knowledge discovery in databases.

Diploma thesis " The real role of knowledge mining " is divided into two major parts, the theoretical and the practical. The practical part describes the basic concepts of data mining, various methods and types of tasks used for knowledge discovery in databases and algorithms used in this area . Main focus is devoted to the CRISP -DM methodology and to various stages of knowledge discovery from databases. This methodology will be later used as the basis for practical part of the thesis while other less known methods used for data mining won`t be neglected. List of paid and free software which can be used for knowledge mining in databases is presented at the end of theoretical part. The second part of the thesis is focused on the practical step by step application of the CRISP -DM methodology, which contains real data from the field of mobile communications. Data mining task used in practical part is the behavioral prediction of mobile carrier customers. Supporting the practical part of the thesis, IBM SPSS Modeler was used as a main software for knowledge mining. Key words: data mining, knowledge disvocery in databases. Churm management, prediction, CRISP-DM.