In a time when customer attention is limited and subscription fatigue is increasing, data professionals like Wael Breich show that advanced analytics are essential for survival, not just helpful. His work demonstrates how merging technical expertise with strategic thinking can turn customer churn into opportunities for growth.
Who Is Wael Breich?
Wael Breich is a skilled analytics professional specializing in customer insights, churn prediction, and data-driven strategy in the media and entertainment industry. In his current role at DIRECTV, he collaborates with base management, strategy, sales, and finance teams to turn complex data into actionable business strategies.
Wael’s work includes analyzing product performance, assessing customer behavior patterns, developing engagement and churn-prediction metrics, and supporting forecasting efforts that inform long-term planning. His insights help the organization better understand subscriber behavior and implement initiatives to improve retention and increase lifetime value.
Bridging engineering, business strategy, and advanced analytics, Wael offers a multifaceted view of customer behavior and value creation in subscription-based industries. He stays dedicated to applying data science principles to guide strategic decisions and foster organizational growth.
Churn Isn’t Just a Metric; It’s a Strategic Weak Point
Subscription-based businesses often treat churn as a lagging indicator. However, throughout his storied career, Wael has repeatedly seen that it is far more than that. As a direct result, his approach identifies churn early, using trial-period engagement metrics to forecast survival probabilities.
For instance, Wael’s work identified an 18% improvement in survival rate by Month 6 for highly engaged DIRECTV trial subscribers. Thanks to these findings, the company was able to tailor its services better to specifically target longevity, with its accumulated data as its backbone.
Analytics Must Serve Strategy, Not Just Measurement
Wael’s unique ability lies in translating analytics into strategy, informing decisions that drive long-term business value.
He details, “It’s not about the number of tools and software. While technical skills are always good to have, professionals who stand out in the industry are those who understand the business and are able to tie data to applicable real-world solutions.”
Wael’s work helped DIRECTV achieve $11 million in additional cash flow through market targeting, enabling them to craft more effective business plans that ebbed and flowed with the market.
Scalable Frameworks Over One-Off Analyses
Rather than performing ad-hoc reporting, Wael builds scalable churn and forecasting models that support cross-functional decision-making. His predictive work has led to a $15M increase in customer lifetime value via retention tests. This is thanks in no small part to his background in civil engineering and international business, which allows Wael to communicate fluently across operational and executive teams.
One of the biggest challenges Wael has consistently faced is working with large volumes of data coming from different systems, each with its own structure, definitions, and limitations. In analytics, raw data is rarely clean or aligned, so the first hurdle is always understanding, validating, and reconciling multiple data sources to create a coherent picture.
Early in Wael’s career, this was particularly challenging, navigating inconsistent fields, missing information, and conflicting definitions required patience and a lot of investigative work. Today, however, he is renowned for breaking down complex statistical models into actionable insights that inform product, finance, and customer success strategies.
Advanced Analytics as a Core Business Function
Wael’s analytics guided DIRECTV through major shifts, like their streaming migration initiative, contributing over $1.5M in retained value.
He also validated the impact of customer service restructuring, from Makati to Boise, with a 10% disconnect rate improvement.
In the next few years, Wael hopes to lead large-scale churn and customer lifecycle initiatives in the media space or in any subscription-based business. Wael Breich’s goal is to take the expertise he built in customer behavior, retention strategy, and predictive analytics and apply it at a broader, more strategic level.