  Tasks critical to enterprise profitability, such as customer churn
prediction, fraudulent account detection or customer lifetime value estimation,
are often tackled by models trained on features engineered from customer data
in tabular format. Application-specific feature engineering adds development,
operationalization and maintenance costs over time. Recent advances in
representation learning present an opportunity to simplify and generalize
feature engineering across applications. When applying these advancements to
tabular data researchers deal with data heterogeneity, variations in customer
engagement history or the sheer volume of enterprise datasets. In this paper,
we propose a novel approach to encode tabular data containing customer
transactions, purchase history and other interactions into a generic
representation of a customer's association with the business. We then evaluate
these embeddings as features to train multiple models spanning a variety of
applications. CASPR, Customer Activity Sequence-based Prediction and
Representation, applies Transformer architecture to encode activity sequences
to improve model performance and avoid bespoke feature engineering across
applications. Our experiments at scale validate CASPR for both small and large
enterprise applications.
