I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned about being a product manager.
People value something most when they’ve just lost it or come close to doing so. If your product prevents this happening, you need to save your client this ball-ache by helping them remember how much they value what they have now so that they don’t take it for granted.
How much would you invest to prevent a mass customer exodus? Everything Everywhere, the merged T-Mobile / Orange behemoth, was happy to spend £150 per customer to shore up its customer base following the post-merger restructuring.
What did it gain? A reduction in monthly churn from 1.7% to 1.3%, significant given their customers number well into the millions, plus an additional 300,000 customers locked into long-term contracts in place of short-term pre-pay contracts.
I was reading Ian Lunn’s recent post, “Judged on the success of your product“, on Product Focus’s new blog and it reminded me of a story:
I once worked with a chap who managed an online service, which charged by amount of data stored. The service was popular and growing its revenues, however the P&L model assumed that data was stored compressed, when in fact the reverse was true. Thus, the more popular the service became, the more it lost money on running costs…
A few months ago, I co-presented a short speaking slot at this year’s Satmetrix Net Promoter European Conference. I’ve reproduced an excerpt from their official blog of the event for posterity.
You can see the full article in its original form at Satmetrix’s European Conference Blog 2010.
