that your churn problems will almost magically be reduced without having to launch any kind of churn management campaign. The issues of universal segmentation and the WAR key performance indicators will be covered in greater detail throughout the rest of this book. ALTERNATIVE CHOICES FOR THE CUSTOMER SYSTEM OF RECORD Not everyone will agree that a customer data warehouse should have this kind of authority. They may argue that transaction- processing systems should be used, and many candidate systems come to mind. What about the billing system? This is the system of record for everything else within the telco already. Why displace it as the center and ultimate source of information? Others may point to the call center management system as more appropriate or see a campaign management software package as a more logical source for this kind of information. Still others may propose that prepackaged customer relationship management software will get Chapter 10 the job done faster, easier, and better than the cumbersome process of building a customized data warehouse. Unfortunately, none of these options have ever proved viable in the past, and they are unlikely to do SO in the future. Billing System Problems Of all of the alternatives, the thought of using the billing system as the definitive source of customer information is both attractive and repellent at the same time. It already holds the majority of the information that we need. Why not just retrofit it a little bit to do the rest of the job? Anyone who has worked with billing systems for more than a few hours knows the answer to this question. Billing systems are already the most over-used and most under-maintained of all computer systems on the face of the earth. There is not a telco on the planet with a billing system that is smart enough, fast enough, and flexible enough to meet even current processing demands. And there is not a billing system in existence now that is not waiting for several man-years of backlogged maintenance and upgrades. Even more impor