Post #5K is dedicated to David Kunkel. His first one said:
To: david thor who wrote (1990)
From: David N. Kunkel
Thursday, Feb 12, 1998 5:16 PM ET
Reply #2009 of 4995
Mr. Thor,
I'm David Kunkel Sr. VP and General Counsel of PSINet. We thought it might be helpful to a number of you who
post here for me to review postings from time to time, and try to respond with facts about the company. Naturally, I can't give out material inside information, nor other sensitive or strategic information, but I want to try to be helpful and provide straight facts where possible.
In response to your question about retention rate, no, we don't include Mindspring or other "wholesale" subscriber
numbers in the figure. So, if for example, Web TV subscribers using our network go up in a given month, and
Mindspring numbers go down, we don't reflect either in our retention rate.
The retention rate is affected by customers (i.e., direct corporate customers) who: (i) leave the Internet completely,
(ii) go from PSINet to another provider, (iii) come to PSINet from somewhere else.
In recent months, through a dedicated effort by our Customer Administration group, we have weeded out a number of accounts which were not current. We have also gained and lost customers through the normal business processes referred to above. As you can see from our financial releases, the average customer account has continued to rise in value. So, one can conclude from this that the accounts that are being lost are smaller than those that we are gaining or upgrading. This has, in fact, been the case for some time.
Finally, we have noticed an improvement in the customer retention rate over the past few months, although it has
clearly not been as high as in previous years or months (prior to about June of 1997).
We do not have any similar data from other commercial ISPs about their customer retention, so one can only speculate about them and whether our experience is consistent with "the market".
THANKS FOR ALL THE POSTS IN-BETWEEN DAVE! |
