Managing Customer Churn via Service Mode Control
研究服务企业如何通过选择两种服务模式（安全或冒险）来最大化客户生命周期价值，客户满意度低于阈值时会概率性流失，最优策略是“三明治策略”：在满意度接近阈值时使用安全模式，否则使用短视最优模式。
We introduce a novel stochastic control model for the problem of a service firm interacting over time with one of its customers who probabilistically churns depending on the customer’s satisfaction. The firm has two service modes available, and they determine the drift and volatility of the Brownian reward process. The firm’s objective is to maximize the rewards generated over the customer’s lifetime. Meanwhile, the customer might churn probabilistically if the customer’s satisfaction, modeled as an Orstein–Uhlenbeck process controlled by the firm’s service mode, is below a certain threshold. We build upon Markov processes with spatial delay to solve this problem, and we explicitly characterize the firm’s optimal policy, which is either myopic or a sandwich policy. A sandwich policy is one in which the firm deploys the service mode with inferior reward rate when the customer satisfaction level is in a specific interval near the satisfaction threshold and uses the myopically optimal service mode for all other satisfaction levels. Specifically, we find that the firm should use the safe service mode when the customer is marginally satisfied and the risky service mode when the customer is marginally unsatisfied. We find numerically that the customer lifetime value under the optimal policy is large relative to that under the myopic policy. Our results are robust to a variety of alternative model specifications. Funding: J. Lu gratefully acknowledges financial support from Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [Project 72192805]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/moor.2021.0179 .