NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

Before you startLesson 2 of 14

The decision already made

By the time a customer tells you they are leaving, they are informing you of a decision, not making one.

The instrument The decision lag

0:46. Captions on by default. Everything said here is also written on this page, so nothing is only in the video.

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A renewal conversation feels like a decision point. It almost never is. It is the moment a decision made some time ago becomes visible to you, and the lag is usually months. The customer formed a view, stopped investing effort in making the thing work, quietly began looking, and carried on using the service normally throughout, because switching is expensive and there was no reason to move early. That is why interventions at the renewal date return so little. You are arriving after the decision, when the customer has the least remaining doubt. It also explains the accounts that churn with no warning signs in the relationship. There were signs. They were not in the relationship, because a person who has decided to leave is frequently pleasant.

A renewal conversation feels like a decision point. It almost never is. It is the moment a decision that was made some time ago becomes visible to you.

The lag is usually months. The customer formed a view, stopped investing effort in making the thing work, quietly began looking, and then continued using the service normally throughout, because switching is expensive and there was no reason to move early.

This is why renewal-date interventions have such poor returns. An operation that discovers risk at renewal is intervening after the decision, at the moment the customer has the least remaining doubt and the most invested in an alternative.

It also explains a pattern that confuses a lot of teams: accounts that churn with no warning signs in the relationship. There were signs. They were not in the relationship, because the customer had no incentive to make them visible, and a person who has decided to leave is frequently pleasant.

Everything in this volume is aimed at moving detection earlier. The instruments are ordinary and most of the data already exists.

Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything

One Help decide what a competent operator is expected to know The eight domains carry equal provisional weighting until practicing operators say what the work actually is. Takes about eight minutes. Two Check whether you are eligible About a minute. No account, no email field, and nothing you enter is kept.

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