eing met). However, we should consider that if your company reduces the rate to all of your customers in order to prevent a price reduction by the competition, how much revenue will it cost you? How many Chapter 6 months could you have been able to maintain the same old billing rate without jeopardizing the customer? This decision about when to churn-proof a customer is critical. The trick involved in running pre-emptive churn management is to delay the expenditure of funds or the reduction of customer rates as much as possible without actually allowing the churn event to take place. On the other hand, failing to address the issues proactively greatly increases the chances of losing the customer altogether. Selective Vs. Blanket Preemptive Investing There is a lot of flexibility involving how and when you might administer any of the pre-emptive churn management techniques. The most important factor is making sure your company does a good job of managing the investment. An overzealous pre-emptive campaign can be extremely wasteful and can expose a bad business sense. To illustrate how pre-emptive churn investment can work, we will examine one of the most critical areas of customer dissatisfaction: Customer Service. We will also analyze how this pre-emptive investment can be managed in the most efficient and effective manner. The Case for Customer Service Since one of the main reasons for customer dissatisfaction in the wireless industry stems from poor customer service, it would make sense to make a pre-emptive investment in this area of the firm. This observation may seem obvious, but it gets a bit tougher to recognize when we need to address the specifics. How do we know the appropriate amount to invest in customers? Should we spend $1 per customer per month, $10 per customer per month, or more? There are several techniques available to help us answer some of these questions, but before we start investing anything in the customer service function, we should first consider a few important facts. Any investment in