Predicting Customer Churn in the Insurance Industry: Identifying the Influential Factors

Iran insurance industry has recently faced with various problems regarding fluctuations in profitability, portfolio composition, the rate of loss, the rate of penetration, retention and satisfaction of insurers and market share, due to presence of numerous insurance companies in the competitive market. As a result, insurer maintenance has become a major goal for most of the insurance companies. Since in the insurance industry, like many other industries, the cost of searching for new insurers is far more expensive than retaining the current insurers, it is essential to identify the factors that drive insurers to churn. The purpose of this study is to investigate the literature and research background in the field of customer churn, which ultimately leads to identifying and classifying “influential factors in predicting customer churn in the insurance industry”. A systematic literature review method is used to collect and review previous studies by integrating automated and manual search strategies of all the related research articles in this field, published for the period 1389 to 1398 for Persian articles and 2010 to 2018 for English articles. The research findings identified 85 factors that affect customer churn, specifically in the insurance industry. They are classified into four categories; the factors related to the insurer, the factors related to the insuree, product/service related factors and factors regarding the relationship between the insurer and the insuree.