ak out. In the short run, this approach can be effective, but only until competitors switch to alternative strategies. Making the Continued Expansion Approach More Effective When a company has decided to use continued expansion as its primary churn management strategy, it can still benefit from the insights we have been talking about. Gathering intelligence about eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook which kinds of customers are of the most value and are the least likely to churn can be a valuable bit of information for the developers of acquisition campaigns. Altering the company's acquisition strategy to target only the best-value customers of least likelihood to churn can improve the churn profile dramatically. Offensive - Predatory Acquisition The second most common strategy pursued by companies that are loosing customers is to try to steal customers from their competitors to make up for the losses. Predatory acquisition is most common when the market is near its full saturation rate and there are very few new customers to gain. At this point, growth can only come at some other carrier's expense. Making Predatory Acquisition More Effective Predatory acquisition, like the regular expansionary acquisition, can be conducted naively, or can make use of what is known about customers and their churn behavior. Just as in the expansionary acquisition case, the people designing predatory campaigns can be sure to target high value, low churn customers in their efforts. Even more importantly, the campaign designers can use what they know about why a person will churn to help develop programs that will easily seduce the customer away from the competition. Defensive - Retention Management Eventually, most firms come to realize that their acquisition efforts alone are not enough to truly address churn issues. As companies mature and as their analytical and operational capabilities become more sophisticated, they begin to build customer churn management capabilities. Making Churn Management More Effectiv