The term serial switcher was first coined by Charles Turner and David Alexander in their Customer relationship management course and then their CRM Pocketbook. It describes a person who continually moves his/her patronage from one company to another and highlights the ignorance of many organisations, including credit card companies, who strive for customer acquisition regardless of retention rates.
By offering a range of financial incentives, such as free balance transfers or interest free periods, a company may hope to attract new customers. This is superficially attractive to companies if it meets acquisition and competitive switching targets. In practice, however, a serial switcher will not contribute any profit if he/she does not stay long enough to provide a return on investments. The lesson is that lack of integration and analysis across the business allows bad decisions to be made.