As reported in FierceWireless, several milestones for Verizon and Cingular were achieved this past quarter.
FierceWireless is a periodic wireless industry newsletter published by the folks at www.fiercemarkets.com. In a recent issue, they wrote about Verizon’s latest net income being down, with highest ever contribution from the Verizon-Vodaphone joint venture. They also wrote about the churn and used the Cingular rate of 1.7%. Unfortunately, they did not write about what the churn rate for Verizon was, other than we should expect it to decline further.
So, I googled it, and found this article on how Verizon reduced their churn rate.
They implemented a cross functional team of IT and marketing people to use data warehousing techniques to develop a predictive churn model, or a predictive takers model and then targeted specific marketing offers at moments where customers were most vulnerable. Better, yet, experimental techniques provided the mechanism for optimizing customer responsiveness.
This process described in this article is also in print. I read a book while a marketing executive at Nortel called Enterprise One to One, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. In this 1997 book, the basics of systematic customer segmentation, statistical insights gained through experimentation and laser-guided focus on the key segments at risk, saved money, improved customer retention and drove higher returns for the companies and cases reviewed in this 400+ page, easy-to-read tome.
