What are the main application so of uplift modelling?
A. So far the biggest successes with uplift modelling have been in the areas of customer retention and demand generation (cross-sell and up-sell, particularly). The state-of-the-art approach to customer retention is to predict which customers are at risk of attrition (or “churn”) and then to target those at high risk who are also of high value with some retention activity. Unfortunately, such retention efforts quite often backfire, triggering the very attrition they were intended to save. Uplift models can be used to identify the people who can be saved by the retention activity. There’s often a triple win, because you reduce triggered attrition (thus increasing overall retention), reduce the volume targeted (and thus save money) and reduce the dissatisfaction generated by those who don’t react well to retention activity. The other big successes have come in the area of cross-sell and up-sell, particularly of high-value financial products. Here, purchase rates are often low, and the ov
