2degrees is New Zealand’s fastest growing mobile telecommunications company - In less than 3 years, they have transformed the landscape of New Zealand’s mobile telecommunications market. Entering very much as the challenger and battling with incumbents entrenched in the market for over 18 years, 2degrees has won over 580,000 customers and has revenues of more than $100 million in just their third year of operation. Last year’s growth was 3761 percent. Situation 2degrees’ information solutions manager, Peter McCallum, explains that predictive analytics had been on the radar at the company for some time.
“At 2degrees there are a lot of analytically aware people, from the CEO down. Once we got to the point in our business that we were interested in deploying advanced predictive analytics techniques, we started to look at what was available in the marketplace.” It soon became clear that although on paper there were several options, the reality was that the cost of deploying
the well-known solutions made it very difficult to build a business case, particularly given that the benefits to the business were as yet unproven.

Questions for Discussion
1. What does 2degrees do? Why is it important for 2degrees to accurately identify churn?
2. What were the challenges, the proposed solution, and the obtained results?
3. How can data mining help in identifying customer churn? How do some companies do it without using data mining tools and techniques?