Customer Base Analysis

I see that long time correspondent Professor Peter Fader at Wharton has an upcoming workshop on Probability analysis of the customer base. This is an area I did work on in the enterprise.   Important things to think about.:  

" ... Customer-base analysis seeks to use information on the history of customer purchase patterns to address forward-looking questions such as: (1) Which individuals are most likely to be active (or inactive) customers in a future period of time? (2) What will the aggregate and disaggregate purchase patterns look like for a group of customers in the future period? (3) What will be the “customer lifetime value” for a group of customers listed in the firm’s database? An increasingly large number of practitioners have been charged by senior management to obtain valid answers to these kinds of questions, but unfortunately their skills – and the set of commonly available commercial tools – are not well-suited for these important tasks.... "