The problem is, they're are more shares being dumped than accumulated.
Money flow is distinctly positive.
retention rate of DSL subs
It's a bit early in the game to talk about retention on DSL. Taking a page from the dialups, the DSL providers started using 2-3 year contracts. Fortunately, some have had such poor signup rates they have recently backed down on that and I'm getting advertizing offering no long contract.
I'd rather have the later; most of the unhappy folks won't leave anyway, they'll just need some massaging (give them a few free months until their problems are fixed... hmmm, who uses that tactic).
Oh man, with that attitude you could be in my business, the photographic lab business. This is the attitude of the larger concerns that think that they are my competitors. Their attitude is that," Hey can't make money doing too good a job and people are going to be unhappy anyway and there's more where they came from." Meanwhile I was able to come in with little or no capital, promise people the best possible work that they could get anywhere on the planet and take a very large chunk of change off their plates and cherry pick their best customers before they even knew what was going on. Meanwhile I still have the first ten clients I ever signed on twenty years later and turn away more business than I do.
It is always better to retain customers than to be an AOL that is always looking for fresh meat. You can count on a certain number of people staying out put because they don't want to make the simple move to leave, but never underestimate the overwhelming negative effect on your business of unhappy customers. Remember the Pentium bug? The busy signal crisis at AOL? New Coke?
If you think that 500,000 unhappy customers out of 5 million is OK, don't bother applying for work at my business or at FEDEX, or even Walmart for that matter. |
