Retention @ Telco

Win-Back 

Customer retention is 5- 10 times cheaper than customer acquisition.

It is natural then for Telco Operators to concentrate their efforts to avoid churn. Churn Prevention is one of the final goals of Customer Service and Customer Experience Management.

If Service Level, NPS, CSAT are operational KPIs to measure Customer Service and Customer Experience performance, the ultimate measure of the success is the Churn Rate and ARPU.

If we speak about Retention, we are speaking about 3 main areas:

1. Reactive Retention – the effort to retain the customers once they have signalized the intention to resile their subscription
2. Win-Back – all the efforts to win back customers who once resiled their subscription
3. Proactive Retention – all initiatives and efforts to prevent customer intention to terminate their contracts or to stop using the services.

This article is focusing on Win-Back showing some good and not so good practices.

Win-Back is used for all the efforts to convince the customer to reactivate his cancelled contract once after he has already cancelled it.

Win-Back postpaid customers during the cancellation period 

Customers who cancelled their contract have a cancellation period (at least up to the end of the billing cycle) where they still use the services until finally the line will be disconnected

in the period after the contract cancellation up to line disconnection.

Bad practice 👎: Just register the contract cancellation requests (after the “reactive retention” offer or even sometimes without even making any special retention offer) and give-up on customer. There are lot of situations where the customers may change their mind: they may have seen the cause of dissatisfaction repaired, the may just wait another better commercial offer, they may have analyzed the competition and understood there is no significative better offer, etc.). 

Best practices 👍: Collect the reason of cancellation when registering the cancellation request:

• If a complain regarding the quality of services or the bill, etc. is the reason: even if customer did not accept to give a final chance to the retention agent to solve the issue, it is still worthwhile to try to solve the issue and call back the customer notifying him about the resolution trying to win him back. At least the customer will leave satisfied, the chance of re-signing a new contract later is very high
• If the cancellation reason is a financial one and even the retention offer was not convincing him to stay, still call back some weeks later the customer to check if he may have changed his mind. Best case has a very special new Retention offer.  
• there are some reasons where another win-back effort makes no sense (customer leave the country, sold the house – broadband contract, death, etc.)
• if customer don’t want to explain the reason, there may be still worthwhile to call back some weeks later the customer to check if he may have changed his mind

Win-Back of customers after receiving a port-out request

Bad practice 👎: the port-out request is maybe similar with a voluntary cancellation request and the normal reflex would be to act similar with reactive retention efforts and offers

Why the retention efforts of the port-out customers is not promising at all:#

• The portability is a strong regulated process in all the countries - in many countries the operator is legal not allowed to contact customers anymore 
• Regulated is also the duration of the port-out transaction which has to be finalized within few days, if not even 24 hours – this gives operators a very short time to contact customers (if allowed) for retention
• Customers have already taken a decision and signed-off a contract with the new operator. It is very hard to convince the customers to change their mind and retract their contract with the competition. This is why in my practical experience the save-rate is so low that these kinds of efforts don’t pay off

Win-Back of customers at the time their first contract at the competition is expiring.

Telecommunication our days is a commodity. Almost 100% of customers who are cancelling a contract with an operator are immediately after signing off a contract with another operator. 

There is no better lead for a new acquisition as an ex-customer for which the operator has still a detailed profile.

Best practices 👍: As part of the cancellation process collect every time customer the acceptance of the customers to be contacted later with news and special offers. Depending on the local regulations define an innovative legal way of contacting later the customers

Plan properly the best time to contact the customers – few weeks before the end of the new contract with the other operator

Keep customer profile to prepare a personalized win-back offer when contacting later the customer

The win-back campaign had always best success rate compared with any other acquisition campaign.