Preface

Abstract

A company that has just lost its customers' trust almost never learns about it from the customers. It learns from a churn dashboard, three quarters late, in a cohort that has already gone quiet. By then the decision that caused it — a repricing memo, a rewritten support script, an integration that made the data flow one way it had not flowed before — is buried in a quarter that closed clean and looked, at the time, like good management. Nobody was villainous. Somebody was optimizing. This is the shape of the problem this book is about, and the reason it resists the tools normally aimed at it. Trust does not fail loudly. It fails on a delay, in a different department from the one where it was spent, and it fails in a currency your finance function has no line item for. The consequence arrives as a rising cost of acquisition, a longer sales cycle, a discount you have to offer now that you did not have to offer before, a regulator's letter, a journalist's call. Each of those gets handled by whoever owns it. None of them gets traced back.