Patent ID: 8199901

Claim:
A customer retention method, comprising: acquiring information indicative of service usage by customers, wherein the information indicative of customer service usage comprises a first set of information corresponding to a first time period and a second set of information corresponding to a second time period; providing an analysis of the information that predicts the likelihood of churn for each of the customers, wherein the step of providing comprises: comparing the first set of information to the second set of information to produce comparison results; and assigning each of the customers a rank according to a scale representative of predicted likelihood of churn based on the comparison results; identifying at least one affected customer based on the analysis, wherein the step of identifying comprises: comparing the rank of each of the customers to a threshold rank to identify the at least one affected customer as being most likely to exhibit churn; and automatically selecting at least one customer support executive based on skill in handling the at least one affected customer to initiate an action.