overage Customer Service Image New Technology Figure 14-5: Customer Ranking - Poor Coverage In general, customer rankings will be more randomly distributed across the full range of values. Importance of Reason to the Customer After discovering how the customer rates the firm for each of the variables listed, our next task it to determine how important each factor is to this customer. After all, if a customer ranks the company lower for image, but considers image to be rather unimportant, then a low rating can be positive. On the other hand, if the customer thinks that image is the most important variable, then a low rating is very negative. Churn Reasons Importance Availability Price Quality Coverage Customer Service Image New Technology Figure 14-6: Ranking and Importance The table in Figure 14-6 indicates that this particular customer thinks that coverage, new technology, and quality are the most important factors. Since the company is ranked as a 10 for two of these, then that is good. However, a ranking of 1 for coverage is bad since the customer thinks that coverage is the most important factor (ranked eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook Availability of Alternatives Finally, to maximize the use of our churn index, we must include a factor for measuring the kinds of alternatives available and to what degree are they available. For example, price may be the most important factor to the customer, and may have ranked the company high in this category, but the real test of churnability comes only when a lower cost alternative becomes available. The same is true for all of the other factors as well. For example, poor coverage in an area where no one else can offer any better coverage is not a serious liability. We will assign the availability of alternatives to our index using the same scale of 1 to 10, and we will use our own research to provide the values. The Churn Cube What we are left with, to generate our CCI, is a three-dimensional matrix that assigns a customer ranking, a customer rat