Livewire

If a travelling mobile-user temporarily connects to another provider's service because his own provider did not offer adequate roaming, does it count as churn ? If a customer that bought a phone+DSL bundle uses a Skype-type service to make all his long distance calls, should he be included in market share ?

Consumers have become less predictable, and people's lives have taken on the parallelism and self-directing knowledge of an IP packet navigating the network. The needs of INDIVIDUAL customers are changing faster than any older notion of a generic customer market.

For communications service providers, the best approach to enhancing their capacity to anticipate change is to become the change agent itself. Market segmentation has shifted from organizaing-around-what-you-offer to organizing-around-what-people-want. It is easy to forget that even in the age of wire-line voice, the real reason someone used the phone was not primarily because the network was available, but because they loved to hear the voice of the person at the other end of the line.

Customer Integration is the new theme - and not just left to the customer service department. Loyalty programs are evolving into product co-creation for the intimacy it provides in customer relationships. Market share is passe. Wallet share is paramount. How much of each customer's needs you service is becoming more important than how many customers you service.