DOI: 10.36347/sjebm.2018.v05i03.011

Pages: 211-217

This desk-study explored the propensity for a customer to churn in various industries in Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa in order to determine its extent and effects to business growth. The major finding of the study was that customer churn was prevalent in all the regions with the negative impact on business growth being quite apparent. Most of the empirical studies were conducted in the services sectors focusing on business to customer scenario. The major determinants of customer churn included core service failures, attraction to competitors, service encounter failures, pricing, inconvenience, switching costs, and attraction to competitors, and lack of loyalty programmes, poor service quality, and better offers from competitors with superior technology. Firms adopted various strategies in order to reduce customer attrition including use of churn prediction models, identification of customer churn high impact factors, data mining models, loyalty programmers, simulation techniques, improved offers, improving service quality and use of logistics regression models to analyses customer data enabling churn management. The study drew heavily on earlier published papers on the determinants of customer churn in the three regions and thus is very much an analytical contribution to the debate on the determinants of customer churn. Future research should focus on gathering field-based evidence on the determinants of customer churn on business to business scenario in Zimbabwe in order to evaluate if the factors are differentiated from those in a business to customer scenario.