to the East Bay Support Team of Mary Ann Crandell, Bob Gokay and Gregg Derevyanik. Your many hours of diligent reading, proofing and editing helped make this book a success. A very special credit to the East Bay Support Team of Mary Ann Crandell, Bob Gokay, and Gregg Derevyanik. Your many hours of diligent reading, proofing, and editing helped make this book a success. Working with people like you is not work at all. It is fun, exciting, interesting, educational, and extremely satisfying. Thanks To my loving daughters, Chris and Stephanie. What a pair you two are! Beautiful, talented, interesting, responsible, creative, volatile, all rolled into one. You continue to inspire and fascinate me and you always will. FOREWORD After reading this book, many of you may say, " 'I wish I had known this years ago." Go back and remember the first time you realized that churn was a problem and that it wasn't going away. My first encounter with churn was in 1985 as the sales manager for New Vector Communications (US West Cellular, now a part of Verizon). When I received my first customer statistics report, the high numbers listed as disconnects alarmed me. I called the home office to chat with the marketing people to try to come up with a better way to measure the impact these disconnecting customers were having on our business and to see if there was a statistic we could use as a measure to monitor the problem. Being in sales and being paid for getting new customers, I was sure it wouldn't be long before someone would figure this out and change our targets and compensation to make up for this "hole in the bucket". We began tracking churn by dividing the number of disconnected lines for a month by the total number of lines in service at the beginning of the month. It didn't take long before the whole cellular industry was talking about churn and in 1988 I found myself running a customer service organization at the height of the "Total Quality" movement. Our churn was then running between 2.5 and 3.0% per month. Having been from