od way to get a price reduction is to churn often. We have creates "professional churners." Most often, the customer will not come back anyway. Finding the Critical Moment To develop an optimum churn management strategy, we need to create a mechanism that allows us to monitor the likelihood of a customer to churn at any given time, SO that we can determine the best time possible to make the churn prevention investment. While figuring out the absolutely perfect critical moment is functionally impossible, it is feasible to establish approaches that allow us to approximate the optimum moment and define at least a "critical time zone" in which action should be taken. Chapter 7 STRATEGIC APPROACHES The various perspectives of churn that we have discussed SO far all provide us with valuable information required for the development of a strategy, but they do little to recommend which action is best. Basically, three fundamental strategic approaches are possible for a telco company to maintain when it comes to issues of churn. All of them are legitimate, with their own strengths and weaknesses, and each can be effective in its own way. Also, there is no reason why a firm should be required to execute only one of these strategies. It is common to develop a plan that utilizes all three simultaneously. Equally important for us to be aware of is the fact that, no matter which of the three strategies we are talking about, the prerequisite information we have been discussing will be fundamental to the construction of an implementation plan that allows us to execute the strategy for optimal results. The basic strategies are as follows. Offensive - Continued Expansion One strategy, the one most commonly effected by carriers, especially during the early phases of churn problems, is for the company to simply ignore the loss of customers and try harder to acquire new customers as replacements. This approach can be compared to the process of trying to make up for a whole in a bucket by trying to add fresh water faster than it can le