Planning for Churn

One of the factors that need to be considered in any business plan or forecast is churn – which is when customers drop service. I often see internet service providers (ISPs) build business plans that don’t acknowledge churn, which can be a costly oversight. There is a maxim among last-mile fiber networks that nobody ever leaves fiber to go back to a cable company network. That’s not entirely true, but it’s a recognition that churn tends to be lower on a last-mile fiber network than with other technologies. I wrote a recent blog that asked if broadband is recession-proof. That was really asking if customers drop broadband when they lose jobs or see household income drop. The reality is that some folks have no choice but to drop fiber if things get tough enough. Churn is one of the details of operating an ISPs that many new ISPs don’t get for a while. But it’s vital to have a strategy. It’s far cheaper to somehow catch a new customer when they move to town. It’s far less costly to catch the new tenant moving into a building that always has a drop.

[Doug Dawson is president of CCG Consulting.]