The Experts Praise

Customer Churn Reduction and Retention for Telecoms

Arthur’s book explains a tremendously important new technology: individually addressable TV advertisements which promise to be of great value to the TV industry in the years ahead.

Arthur’s book provides the perfect summary of challenges presented within the Telecom industry. He has done a great job in summarizing the landscape of technologies and challenges presented today, as well as providing a roadmap to help the marketer tackle some of these challenges head-on. He offers an excellent insight into the future.

Arthur Hughes has demystified the telecom industry along with its convergence and new techologies and presents a clear, concise overview of telecom best practices. This converging story is applicable to many other business categories—media, publishing, retail/catalog/online, travel, financial services to name just a few. The lessons learned here are powerful takeaways for any serious marketer, direct marketer or database marketer trying to anticipate future opportunities and stay ahead of the competition. The challenges facing the telecom world—customer churn, service commodity, price resistence—and the solutions—product extension,repurposing product, multi-channel marketing, multi-product solutions, cross sell, upsell and frequency marketing programs—apply to all aspects of today’s (and tomorrow’s) competitive business environments.

Telecoms have been very late adopters in using the power of electronic communications as a customer retention tool. Their subscribers, however, have changed their expectations, in a very positive way, towards good e-mail marketing from their telecom provider. In his usual very readable and home-spun way Arthur Middleton Hughes explains clearly why gaining a strong relationship with each telecom subscriber is not only more vital but also more achievable today with sophisticated electronic communications.

Like his previous volumes, Arthur Hughes’ new book delivers far more
than its title implies. All marketers and especially telecom industry exec-
utives will discover a great deal they didn’t know—a goldmine of knowl-
edge and experience and how to put it to productive and profitable use.

Arthur Hughes has written several groundbreaking works on how to retain customers. Now he has done one for the high-churn telecom business. First he describes the problems faced by the telcos, then offers solutions. His antidote to increasing commodization? Analytics. Every marketer should read it.

This book is a landmark for two majors reasons. First, it takes database marketing math and logic and applies it to a service industry with monthly billings. This is no minor stretch from before. This is a major step forward in thinking that can apply to many other industries. Second, it follows an industry that is rapidly changing right now. From business people to college students, everyone can understand and relate
to the changes in telecom, since they have lived through so many of those changes. Choosing the telecom industry to tell this story brings life to the examples everyone can apply to their own situation.