Devoted to customer service and the principles of exceptional customer services

There's a great debate over at the Wharton website about firing your worst customers (via Duct Tape Marketing).  The study done by two Wharton marketing professors says that firing your "low value" customers is counterproductive because:

"Companies that rid themselves of low-value customers -- or take steps to turn low-value customers into high-value ones -- leave themselves open to successful poaching by competitors. If the competition knows that you have fired many or all of your low-value customers, they are likely to intensify their efforts to take your remaining customers away from you because they now know that all, or most, of those remaining customers are of the high-value variety."

As I've said before, this is the most debatable topic in customer service.  A part of me says that it is ok to fire those customers with a few loose bolts, but I also believe that it is possible to turn what we perceive to be low value customers into high-value customers.