 sales, I asked myself how we might get people excited about improving the churn situation. I assumed that everyone in the company would have the same attitude as the sales people. My view of the world was that there were two kinds of people in the business world. One group was paid to bring in new customers and new revenue and other was paid to make sure that those customers stayed. The first time I shared this view with the customer service reps in my call center, I thought they were going to kill me. From their perspective, sales people were the enemy, acquiring all kinds of difficult to manage customers that they, the customer service reps, then needed to deal with. I looked at the churn numbers and asked myself, "Why are we counting churn numbers anyway?" Is it our goal to eliminate "all" churn, and never loose any customers? Is anyone even motivated to try to accomplish that kind of objective? Being new to customer service and to running call centers, I began reading everything I could about how to improve them. I visited organizations such as American Express and L.L. Bean to see how they were handling customers and what they did about churn in their industries. I also examined my own behavior as a customer. I asked myself "Which companies do I stick with? " and "Which companies do I leave?" Then it hit me. Everyone in the industry talks about customer satisfaction and improvement of customer service as key issues, but no one ever actually talks about the customers themselves. People talk about "retention" and "head count" and "minimizing the churn rate" and about "retained subscribers". No one talks about what our customers need, or how we can make them more satisfied. I began asking our executives and employees to describe the long- term relationships they have with companies. I asked them to think about the companies that they are loyal to, and to try to figure out why. I asked them, "Have you ever referred to yourself as a "retained subscriber?" The answer was always "No." In fact, when we really like 