A defection prevention procedure using a self-organizing map for on-line game providers

The retention of customer is an increasingly pressing issue in today's competitive environment. The proposal of this paper is a personalized defection detection and the procedure of prevention based on economic analysis of customer defection possibility, and behaviour state transition cost. This procedure is based on the observation that potential defectors have a tendency to take a couple of months or weeks to gradually change their behaviour before their eventual withdrawal. In this procedure, the SOM (Self-Organizing Map) is used to determine the possible states of customer behaviour from past behaviour data, and to prevent the defection of potential defectors, the proposed procedure recommends the desirable behaviour state for the next period based on the analysis of transition cost, and likelihood of defection. The case study has been conducted for a Korean on-line game provider to evaluate this procedure.