 the underlying issue, namely the customer relationship management problem. Once you solve that, the churn management problem literally disappears. Why? Because when you understand who your customers are, what they want, and what you are willing to do to keep them, when you treat your interaction with customers like a relationship, then when they leave, it will be by mutual consent. You will both agree that it is better that way. Churn does not especially reflect a failure on your part. It can reflect good judgment just as well. eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook Managing Relationships - the Marriage Model You can wait to manage your relationship with customers until it is just about ready to fail (when churn is about to occur), or you can try to manage the customer relationship overall, from beginning to end. The latter will generally get much better results. Treat the relationship with customers like a marriage relationship? How can that be done? What possible bearing could the rules for human interaction at the personal level have for a telco with millions of customers? A radical concept? Certainly. But applying analogies to new approaches is often very helpful. Analogies refer us to something familiar and help us understand what is still new and strange. So to help us understand how a telco can have a good relationship with customers, we will compare it to what it takes to have a good marriage relationship. Figure 8-1: A Marriage of Consumer and Provider MARRIAGE COUNSELING FOR THE TELCO What then are the keys to a successful marriage relationship and how can that be applied to the telecommunications business? There are hundreds of books written on the subject of human relationship management and millions of expert opinions that you can obtain Chapter 8 by opening any newspaper, listening to the radio, or asking just about any person on the street. This wisdom can be boiled down to a few core concepts. It is our premise that these same core concepts are equally valuable for the person t