Re:Ask HN: Why and how did Comcast figure out I'm moving?
by Jugurtha on Sunday August 23, 2020 @11:00AM
(#24252380)
Comcast handles terabytes of telemetry data daily from customer-premises equipment[0]. They could have internal machine learning models for customer retention / churn reduction from the data you're generating, whether bandwidth usage, sites visited, etc. Some model(s) may have inferred that you had a higher likelihood to move and or churn. You can train such models from historical data of people who have moved in the past, and if there's a chance that people who move tend not to care about their subscription anymore, cancel it, or renew it after a long period, there is lost revenue to be minimized. A provider will then engage you, either through email or via a customer support representative if the revenue per customer is high.
This does work and organizations pay close attention to it. If you have a retail bank that makes around $1,000 per customer with 6% churn rate and 10 million customers, this adds up to quite a chunk of change.
It could also be a coincidence due to the current trend of people moving around, and sending emails like this to remove one cognitive process from someone who already has many things to sort out.
This does work and organizations pay close attention to it. If you have a retail bank that makes around $1,000 per customer with 6% churn rate and 10 million customers, this adds up to quite a chunk of change.
It could also be a coincidence due to the current trend of people moving around, and sending emails like this to remove one cognitive process from someone who already has many things to sort out.
[1]: https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2019/2019-what-can...