Telco Churn Handbook competitive offers. This can be extremely valuable and low-cost information to collect. The Proxy Approach The other very popular, if somewhat unethical, approach that some companies use is to have designated employees sign up as customers of the competitor's service. These proxy customers can then experience how good the pricing, customer service, quality, and coverage are of the competition. This technique allows the firm to control many of the variables and obtain valuable information through direct observation of how a competitor conducts business. enough proxies are used, then some interesting and valid extrapolations can be gathered. On the other hand, it is giving business to the competition, and the proxy customers must be well trained if their observations are to be unbiased. Competitive Scores Population As was true with the other dimensions of our CCI scoring process, the scores given to the competition will vary depending on the customer population under study. Universal Factors The easiest factors to appraise are the company-wide factors. Market research against the entire population of potential customers can yield extremely valid results with small samples. Unfortunately, this generalized data can be very misleading when we look to smaller segments, and it is the smaller segments, after all, that interest us most. Adjusting Factors for Segments Some of the most powerful delineation of competitive profiles will occur when we try to apply them according to specific customer segments. For example, there can be some pronounced differences in the way competitors treat commercial versus consumer account- holders. More importantly, if our competition treats various types Chapter 14 of customers differently, then any such sensitivity that we can work into our models will only make them stronger. Adjusting Factors for Geography One of the easiest adjustments to make is to fine-tune our competitive evaluations for customers with dissimilar competitive profiles that live in different geog