One of my clients, a wireless business-to-business (B2B) telecom company, was experiencing a significant problem in their call center. They were absolutely inundated with calls—most of them problems. They were spending a significant amount of money trying to manage the call center—adding new call center representatives, training new call center representatives, bringing in new call center supervisors, figuring out how to limit the duration of calls, developing escalation plans, etc.

The call center was deemed crucial because they were running about a 50-percent customer turnover annually, which they considered simply as a cost of doing business. Their unwritten strategy was to “outsell churn.” In addition, there was no real effort to retain customers—no provisions for doing so in the system. When customers were ready to leave the company, they simply told them how to do it, either by e-mail or fax… until someone in the organization got smart.

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