NAYMZ PROFILE
December 17th, 2009
Statistical Help with Your Dissertation
August 6th, 2009If you are a doctoral student in need of help with your dissertation Methods and Results section , I am qualified to help you with the statistical aspects of your study.
I have a master of statistics degree from North Carolina State University and nearly twenty years experience as a statistician and statistical consultant.
I am generally available 7 days / week to answer your calls and/or emails, between the hours of 9 a.m.—9 p.m. EST. I welcome you to visit my website to review my credentials and learn more about the services that I offer .
Do You Need a Statistical Consultant
August 6th, 2009If you are a sports fan, chances are you have made statements about the winning or losing team. Die-hard fans may rattle off historical information about the success or failure of certain teams. Others may place bets during a championship game hoping to win “the pot” for their selection.
Millions of people play the lottery everyday hoping to win the “jack pot”. There are many instances or people crossing the state boarder to play the lottery, because their resident state has not legalized lotteries. Someone always has the winning ticket, but out of millions of participants, the odds of winning are against you.
Today you may feel like you have a lucky streak, so you decide to try your luck out in a Las Vegas casino. People cross the globe just to win in Las Vegas. Many have success and even more don’t. Who profits more the casino or the people trying their luck? Of course the casino or it would be closed down.
All of the examples mentioned above are the chances of success or the probability of success. In other words, chance is a mathematical probability of success or failure. These examples mentioned are for everyday people, something to do just for fun, unless you are over extending your finances for that “one shot” of success.
What about businesses such as telecommunication, finance, or retail. These businesses have employees that receive regular paychecks and customers who purchase products or services. It is necessary for a business to have a competitive edge in order to meet their return on investment (ROI) and to have marketing strategies in place to ensure they are targeting the correct customers for maximum success of purchase and reduced company expenditures.
Every business should be concern with customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and customer retention because these concepts are what drive profit. In today’s challenging economy and competitive business world, retaining your customers is critical to your success. You must give customers reasons to stay, otherwise your competitor with give them a reason to leave. If you have dissatisfied employees are they going to give you everything they have, take pride in their job, and help drive business to your company? All it takes is for one customer to be offended and they will tell their friends about how badly they were treated.
Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. Statistics provides tools for prediction and forecasting based on the data. Statistical methods can be used to summarize a collection of data. Patterns in the data may be modeled in a way that accounts for uncertainty in the observations, and are then used to draw estimations about the population of interest.
Statistics can be misused by finding ways to interpret the data that are favorable to the presenter. In my experience, if that is done, it always come back to “bite you in the butt”. I am amazed of the many different non-statistical disciplines that are hired to do statistical work in the business world. As mentioned, statistics is a mathematical science and only educated and trained statisticians should be considered for helping to grow and/or save your business. I mean you would only go to a doctor to save your life and not say a first grade school teacher.
Statistical consulting is the most challenging and rewarding part of statistics. A statistical consultant uses the mathematical science of statistics to solve a practical problem. Many statistical consultants run their own business, and to be successful should have a technical background in statistics and an entrepreneur spirit.
You may need a statistical consultant for the following:
- Do you have questions about statistics in general or need statistical tutoring or statistical consulting?
- Do you want statistics explained to you in simple terms using concrete examples?
- Do you need to learn what design of experiment will best answer your question?
- Do you need to develop models to estimate the present or predict the future?
- Do you need help using a statistical software package such as SAS?
- Would you like help interpreting your statistical output and drawing conclusions from your data?
- Do you have data with non-normal patterns?
- Would you like help in preparing tables, listings, and graphs for your report?
- Do you need help combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, data collection, or data analysis?
- Would you like help designing a survey or questionnaire?
- Would you like help with the appropriate sample size determination?
- Would you like help with data mining?
- Do you need help with technical writing?
- Would you like the assistance of a statistical consultant at a conference or summit?
SaraConsultingLlc.com – is a Delaware LLC and provides statistical consulting services.
June 21st, 2009ONE-HOUR TRAINING WEBINAR: Attrition Model and Lifetime Estimates (LTE)
May 12th, 2009Webinar May 26, 2009 – June 16, 2009
Instructor: Melinda Richmond, M.STAT., visit Statistical and Analytical Researach Associates, LLC. Curriculum Vitae
Course Objective:
- What is Survival Analysis?
- Time-Dependent Outcome versus Time-Independent Outcome
- Data Mining and Data Structure
- What software should you use?
- Life Table and Empirical Hazard
- Flexible Hazard Modeling versus the traditional Survival Analysis Modeling in SAS
- How to Forecast Attrition with the Predictive Scores.
- Lifetime Estimate Calculation and how it should be used.
To learn more about the webinar, visit Statistical & Analytical Research Associates, LLC. Training Events
Customer Retention and Customer Lifetime Value
May 4th, 2009The national unemployment rate is 8.5% and in places like North Carolina, where I live even higher, 10.8%. (source: www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/map.economy/index.html).
The new jobless claims rose to 640,000 and unemployment benefits topped 6.1 million. (source: www.necn.com/Boston/Business/2009/04/23/New-jobless-claims-top-640000/1240490384.html).
The new jobless faces are the young and old, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. The recession is throwing millions out of work, it could be your neighbor, it could be you.
In today’s challenging economy and competitive business world, retaining your customers is critical to your success. You must give customers reasons to stay, otherwise your competitor with give them a reason to leave. Customer retention and satisfaction drive profits.
Though it is important to gain new customers, it is much less expensive to hold on to your existing customer base and up-sell more services/products to them.
A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10%. The average company loses 10% of its customers each year. A 5% reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by 25-125%, depending on the industry. (source: http://www.1000ventures.com/business_guide/crosscuttings/customer_retention.html).
Let’s say you have 1000 customers and you average $1000 per sale per year for each of those customers. That’s a total of $1,000,000 per year. Let’s assume your costs are 34% of sales. Studies have shown that across a random selection of industries, businesses lose on average 10% of their customers each year for an assortment of reasons, you are down to $900,000 per year instead of $1,000,000, since you’ve lost 100 customers.
Those 100 customers either (1% ) die, (3% ) move away, (5% ) leave because of a recommendation from a friend or relative, (9% ) leave because they perceive that another company has better products, services, or prices, and ( 14%) leave because they are dissatisfied with your product or service. That’s 32% of the reasons they leave your business. The other 68% of the customers go somewhere else for some other reason, perhaps indifference or they feel taken for granted.
Let’s assume your costs are 34% of sales. A 2% gain in retained customers or retained sales is $20,000 at 66% profit or 34% cost, which means a $13,200 profit increase of $660,000 to $673,200. Over 5 years that’s a total of $100,000 gross revenue increase and $66,000 net profit increase. That’s a net profit change over 5 years from $500,000 to $566,0000. These calculations only consider maintaining the 1000 customer level. So, a 2% gain in customer retention produces a profit increase of 13.2%.
Customer lifetime value is a way of measuring how much your customers are worth over the time they buy your products and services.
As marketing groups strive to gain a competitive advantage, more advanced quantitative and financial techniques are being implemented. One such technique, customer lifetime value (CLV), can provide marketers a multi-faceted view of the effects of marketing campaigns on customer revenue streams.
The future value of a contractual customer depends on the remaining lifetime of their products and the path of their future cash flows. Predicting customer value involves modeling the churn hazard as a function of tenure and other customer attributes. The mean, restricted mean, and median lifetime value are computed by scoring future time intervals with the hazard model.
By first building a churn model, the average lifetime estimate can easily be calculated and then applied to your financial data to calculate customer lifetime value (CLV).
Only trained statisticians should be used to develop customer retention models, customer satisfaction models, cross-sell and up-sell models, and customer lifetime value.
Statistical & Analytical Research Associates, LLC.