h the telco but several with the various parts of the telco in a seemingly random, chaotic, and disturbing fashion. Compare this experience with the relationship these same consumers have with well-run customer relationship management organizations such as MacDonald's, for example. The key to the customer's appreciation of the relationship here boils down to the fact that, wherever they go and no matter what part of the organization they interface with, the message and the relationship is consistent. MacDonald's stores maintain very high levels of store cleanliness, food quality, and friendliness from millions of employees around the world. Advertising messages, public relations activities, and any other interactions are marked by the same consistency of message. Our first order of business, therefore, should be to make sure that our plans are executable across the board. We need to figure out how eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook we can be consistent in whatever strategy we adopt. The primary tool to accomplish that objective is the customer data warehouse. In Chapter 9, we established several reasons why executing a consistent strategy is difficult for the typical telco. A legacy of an engineering-based monopoly business model, combined with a culture of quick change and the rapid expansion of many different customer relationship management groups, has led to an organizational smorgasbord that finds it difficult to approach customers in a consistent and timely fashion. We propose that a central repository of information can serve as the authoritative central source of information about customers and provide the organization with a badly needed coordination point. THE DATA WAREHOUSE TRAP Calling for development of a centralized customer data warehouse to solve the problem is probably fairly obvious to most readers. For almost a decade now, the industry (all industries in fact) has been circulating, re-circulating, and regurgitating the idea that customer data warehouses are the key to cus