Analytics for Customer Strategies

Pre-requisite: MSBA students only. Non-MSBA students can submit the Questrom Waitlist Request Form to request QSTBA 881. Most customer analytics asks whether a strategy is working. This course asks whether it is working for everyone, including the customers, communities, and environment a firm depends on, and shows why strategies that hold up for all of them are the ones that last. Students learn to diagnose customer-facing systems, surface the hidden harms, imbalances, and ethical risks built into firm strategies, and redesign those strategies to protect both performance and trust. Along the way, they examine where profit actually comes from, whether value that customers and firms share, fear-based lock-in, behavioral manipulation, or moral signaling, and learn to tell these apart in the data. The toolkit is advanced and hands-on. Students apply survival models, experimentation, network analysis, causal inference, and explainable AI to simulated and real-world-inspired datasets, and they work with AI as an analytical collaborator, delegating code while owning every assumption, model choice, and interpretation. Projects focus on system-level diagnosis, intervention design, and building new metrics (transparency, externalities, coordination) that capture what standard dashboards miss. Students leave able to design analytics that balance performance with accountability, and to lead data-driven decisions in organizations where the two often pull apart.