Most companies spend a majority of their time, energy and resources chasing new business. While it is important to find new customers to replace lost business, grow the enterprise and expandinto new markets, this goal should be secondary in importance to the main objective — keeping customers and enhancing customer relationships. For example, in France, customer retention iscritical in the mobile phone market; operators have large customer acquisition expenditures and lose more than 30 per cent of their subscribers annually.2 The profitability of customer retention strategies can be determined by industry retention rates, usage segmentation and creating and measuring long-termcustomer value.3 In an analysis of switching behaviour in service industries, Keaveney found that service-oriented factors such as core service problems, service encounter failures, inconvenience, response to failed service and other issues accounted for about 70 per cent of the reasons why customers defect (pricing strategies onlyaccounted for 17 per cent of the switching behaviour).4 Once marketers realise that customers leave organisations primarily due to service reasons, these issues become highly controllable from the firm’s perspective.