said by Chuckles :

I say give up completely on retention and improve customer service. Beef up quality control with calls and make phone reps responsible for what they say. Then when a customer does threaten to cancel just tell 'em goodbye, cya, we dont play the threaten us game! When they try the other company still spending the money on retention instead of actually having people tell you the truth they'll get fed up with the crap and come back.