ow to propel the continued growth of your organization in the direction that your customers need. Remember, this is telecommunications, not retail. You customers' needs will change quickly, and your technology options will change eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook quicker yet. You need to navigate these worlds if you are going to be successful. When the Relationship Is in Trouble Even when two people are doing everything the right way, they sometimes find that their relationship can still be in trouble. When this occurs, there are two choices. Figure out what's wrong and remedy it, or decide that it is better to end the relationship and do SO as painlessly as possible (hopefully leaving the option open for a reconciliation in the future). Figure 8-5: When the Relationship Is in Trouble Churn situations are exactly the same. When customers are getting ready to churn, they are considering ending the relationship. At that point, you must pay special attention to the relationship and do all you can to try to prevent the breakup and, if necessary, be prepared to end it on good terms. Moving Forward with the Marriage Relationship Model Seeing the many parallels betweencustomerrelationshipmanagement and the management of personal relationships, we will proceed to see how much we can learn about the one from the other. Chapter 9 CHAPTER 9 A RELATIONSHIP WITH A TELCO Although everyone agrees that making the telco more customer-centric is critical to its long-term success, no one seems able to identify exactly how that would be done. It is easy to talk about how the telco should behave toward a customer, but an entirely different matter to get the hundreds of employees involved in marketing, sales, customer service, billing, and all other departments to interact with the same customers in the same way. The problems are complex but can be narrowed down to two simple observations. First, to succeed you must have a mechanism in place that allows you to coordinate the activities of the various business u