icial termination phone call. We worked with one prepaid management group who consider churners to be all those that have not recharged their phone in the past three months. With SO many different meanings associated with the word churn is it any wonder that people are confused about how best to manage it. How can you possibly manage what you cannot even define? The Need for a Comprehensive List It is critical, then, before we address churn management strategy that we develop a comprehensive understanding of just exactly what the different kinds of churn might be. There are many ways to categorize customer churn. You can group it by the time it happens (people who churn within one month of signing up, after one year, or when their contracts expire), by the way the customers do it (phone churners, in-person churners, and missing person churners), or by the reasons they give for churning. The most useful approach is to categorize by the reasons for the churn. The Challenges of Reason- Based Churn Categories Categorizing by the reasons for the churn has one large problem in that we have no way of being sure why the person actually leaves. The problem is twofold. First, when customers churn, it is unlikely that they tell us the real reason for their leaving. People may be embarrassed by their real reasons, or may not want to hurt the feelings of the company employee or interviewer. Chapter 3 Second, many times customers do not even know themselves why they are churning. The churn decision is often a complicated one, which even consumers do not understand. Why Use Reason-Based Churn Categories? If churn categorizations are SO inaccurate, why use them at all? It is very simple. The list of churn reasons that we have assembled here include all or most of the commonly identified reasons that have been discovered by different interviewers, surveys, focus groups, and other forms of research. While we cannot always get consumers to tell us what reasons they have for churning, we can find ample evidence for each of these chu