 people in them. In fact, many times people develop these sets of postulations and then run sample surveys to simply validate their assumptions. LOADING THE CUSTOMER CHURN INDEX - COMPETITIVE VARIABLES Once the two customer appraisal dimensions have been assigned (the dimensions reporting on customer opinions about the firm's Chapter 14 performance on the churn factors, and their judgments about how important each one is) we are then ready to assign the most difficult dimension variables. Determine what customers think about our performance is difficult, but it is nothing compared to the job we must undertake if we are going to accurately appraise the availability of alternatives for them. Objectives for Competitive Values Although the first two dimensions of our CCI tell us much about how customers feel about our performance, that information alone does not tell us enough to make adequate churn management decisions. In addition, we need to determine how easy it will be for those customers to attain improved scores from alternative sources. For example, if we are the incumbent telco in a market closed to competition, then having terrible scores on price or quality has minimal impact on our responsiveness. In this case, customers will churn only if they decide to go without phone service at all. Similarly, if our customers tell us that price is important and say that our price is too high, but there are no alternative providers offering better prices, then there is no reason for us to do anything about our price. The customer values of our CCI tell us what the customers want while the competitive values tell us what they can do about it. Once we have both of these sets of information we are able to begin to formulate a strategy. ASSIGNING COMPETITIVE VALUES What we want to do then, for each of our churn factors, is establish a ranking, using our same scale of 1 to 10 to help us understand how accessible alternatives are for the customer. Let's take a look at each of these factors and explore how we might establish