Predicting Customer Churn in the Telecommunications Industry using Machine Learning Techniques

Voluntary customer churn constitutes a persistent financial risk for telecommunications operators, particularly within enterprise customer segments where high-value accounts administer complex, multi-subscription portfolios. Industry data indicate that acquiring a new account costs between five and seven times more than retaining an existing one. Despite heightened industry awareness, the majority of operational retention platforms remain reactive, detecting departure only after the event has occurred. This investigation constructs and evaluates a machine learning pipeline engineered to identify enterprise customer churn risk proactively, drawing on authentic operational records extracted from a business-tobusiness telecommunications environment. The study follows the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) lifecycle. A dataset of 8,454 unique business accounts, characterised by 14 raw attributes and enriched to a final 22-variable feature set, underpins the empirical work. Pronounced class imbalance, churned accounts representing approximately 6.5minority ratio of 14.3:1, necessitated specialised resampling prior to classifier training. Five oversampling strategies were benchmarked; SVMSMOTE produced the largest gain in minority-class sensitivity and was adopted for all subsequent training cycles. Ten classifier families were trained and assessed, including EasyEnsembleClassifier, RUSBoostClassifier, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, Histogram Gradient Boosting, Balanced Bagging, a multilayer perceptron, a soft-voting ensemble, and a stacking ensemble. EasyEnsembleClassifier emerged as the leading model, attaining an F1-score of 0.129 and a recall of 38.242 of 110 churned accounts. Post-hoc explainability analysis through SHAP and LIME identified active subscriber rate, geographic billing zone, and engineered interaction terms as the dominant predictive signals. The framework was operationalised within a FastAPI-based application supporting realtime individual scoring, batch CSV prediction, and retention campaign monitoring. The projected annual revenue protection under conservative assumptions exceeds 74,000 currency units. The study illustrates that interpretable, explainability-augmented machine learning frameworks can bridge the gap between quantitative model output and managerial action, offering a replicable blueprint for data-driven churn governance in both emerging and mature telecommunications markets.