Documenting Churn

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ADesai
ADesai Member Posts: 1 Navigator
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Hi,

What best practices or processes have you used/followed when it comes to documenting churn?

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  • Keith McAfee
    Keith McAfee Member Posts: 1 Navigator
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    That's a pretty broad question, so let me suggest an approach that can help you build your stories as you build the success function. I wrote an article about it, but in essence the idea is that you shouldn't simply tally up the customers who leave and maybe the reasons they leave. You must consider the resource investments that you made, in time spent, opportunity cost perhaps, or you'll be leaving a huge story on the table. For instance, if you assign a resource to a renewal and they succeed, great, but what if they don't? Was it worth it to assign that resource, even though you knew that customer was likely to attrit anyway? We have to take some swings at saving customers or improving the paths they're on, but don't merely look at attrition numbers as the story. They aren't the real story.

  • Andy Powell
    Andy Powell Member, CS Leader Posts: 1 Navigator
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    The approach I've used is capturing:

    (1) a reason from a list of reasons that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE), (2) the story (text written by CSM) which provides more context into what led the customer to say "No", and (3) the loss to competitor (if applicable).

    Closed Lost notifications are sent to the account team and appropriate leadership, so they can spot trends and ask for clarification if the story isn't clear.

    The MECE reason codes provide a means for trending loss reasons monthly, quarterly, etc. to spot and address changing market dynamics.

  • shonafenner
    shonafenner Member Posts: 8 Navigator
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    Creating buckets for churn reasons and a loss competitor field is the perfect foundation! Identification of trends over time will help you be more curious and iterate to develop more reporting/visibility (eg. age of customer at churn, onboarding duration for churned accounts, engagement with email campaigns for churned accounts, completed QBRs for churned accounts, etc etc etc)

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