Using Analytics to Uncover the Cause Instead of Just Treating the Symptoms

Presented: Wednesday, August 9th

Speaker: Debbie Mayville, DHSoft, Director of Decision Sciences

Listen to the archived Web cast.

Download the Web cast presentation.

Download the whitepaper "Using Predictive Analytics to Uncover Root Causes and Solve Problems vs. Treat Symptoms "

What is a cause versus a symptom? Let's take the example of a person going to the doctor for a persistent headache. If the doctor just prescribes aspirin, then he is treating the symptom. If additional research uncovered the patient had brain cancer, then a different tactic should be applied to treat the cause of the headache.

Predictive Analytics can be utilized to uncover root cause issues for companies so they can treat the problem not just the symptoms. For example, a certain telemarketing channel was experiencing very high attrition rates prior to completion of the required 12 month contract. Through data mining techniques, it was determined that this channel was pushing a very low price initial offering, which caused customers to pay more in the end for additional charges. Once the customer realized they were paying more, they cancelled. The churn was just a symptom of customer unsatisfaction from pricing mismatch. By uncovering the real cause of the high churn rates, the company created training programs on how to match pricing levels based on customer needs.

This Web cast will detail statistical techniques on how to uncover the root cause issues at your company. Instead of just fixing symptoms, you need to directly execute against the root cause issues to fix the problem and its key contributing factors.