The Problem
Customer churn in the Indian telecom sector runs between 25% and 35% annually across major carriers, with new entrants (Jio post-2016) forcing legacy operators to compete on price at the expense of margins. The research question: which customer segments churn most, and what signals precede churn in the data?
The goal was not to predict individual churn (that requires a production ML pipeline), but to produce an EDA report that gives a retention team actionable segment-level insight: who to target, with what offer, and why.
Data Sources
The dataset combined public telecom research data with carrier-published aggregate statistics across four networks. Key variables:
- Plan type (prepaid, postpaid, bundled data-voice)
- Tenure band (0–6 months, 6–12 months, 1–2 years, 2+ years)
- Monthly spend quintile
- Average monthly data consumption
- Number of customer service contacts in past 90 days
- Carrier (Airtel, BSNL, Vodafone, Jio)
- Churn flag (binary, self-reported or derived from account closure)
Stack
Key Findings
Three patterns drove the majority of churn across all four carriers:
- Tenure cliff at 6 months. Churn rate is highest in the first 6 months (38% in the first quarter, falling to 18% by month 12). Customers who survive past one year have a churn rate of under 8%.
- High data use, low spend. Customers in the top data-usage quintile but the bottom spend quintile churn at 2.4x the rate of balanced-usage customers. These are value-hunters, likely to leave for any better data-per-rupee offer.
- Customer service contacts predict churn. Any contact in the past 30 days doubles churn probability; two or more contacts triples it. This is a clean, real-time retention signal that requires no model.
Carrier Comparison
Jio showed the lowest churn rate (14% overall) driven by aggressive bundled pricing. BSNL had the highest (41%), concentrated in postpaid customers aged 45+ on legacy plans with no data bundle. Airtel and Vodafone sat in the 26–31% range, with Vodafone's churn skewing toward urban prepaid and Airtel's toward rural postpaid.
Outcome
Delivered as a 28-page EDA report with visualisations and segment recommendations. The rule-based retention flag was the primary deliverable: something a team can use immediately without deploying a model.