cific meaning for the word in mind. What we mean is that we can collect the various reasons customers may have for churning (see Appendix A) and use the data to see if specific customers are leaning more or less in the direction of leaving us. The fact that we can anticipate an individual's churn decision means that we can develop an approach to preventing that churn decision (if the customer is one that we want to save). Some Customer Behavior Can Be Predicted Some of the most effective churn management approaches involve more than simple anticipation. When the conditions are right and you have the capabilities in place, it is actually possible to predict the customer's churn decision. Prediction VS. Anticipation So what is the difference between anticipation and prediction? In a very liberal sense, we could say that anticipation is a type of prediction. Used here, however, the terms take on very specific meaning. The term anticipation refers to the development of a qualitative measure of the likelihood of someone to churn. In other words, we are basing our prediction on judgement, common sense, and good guessing. In contrast, we use the term prediction in the strictest statistical sense. When we predict people's churn, we have a very high mathematically provable likelihood that they actually will churn. Prediction is much stronger and certain than anticipation. In fact, most predictions come with a confidence level, a percentage that tells us how sure we can be that the anticipated event will happen. To say that we are predicting that a specific person will churn with 90% accuracy means that we are very sure of the outcome. eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook Changing the Churn Management Equation Our ability to anticipate and predict churn changes the nature of the churn management equation significantly. Without it, we must assume that any customer could leave at any time, for any reason. That would mean that our churn approaches would be very expensive and not very effective. On the oth