customer-churn-signals
Churn Signals
Identify, operationally define, validate against actually-observed past churn, and rank the signals that precede churn in the user's own accounts. The organizing distinction is leading versus lagging:
- Lagging (reports what already happened): churn rate, lost MRR, a falling NPS.
- Leading (appears weeks before cancellation and leaves time to act): login decline, narrowing feature adoption, a champion going quiet.
Every candidate must pass a two-part actionability test before it is worth shipping:
- It fires early enough that someone can still intervene.
- Someone actually can intervene on it.
Late-firing events - failed payments, downgrade requests, procurement delays, renewal-date slippage - are confirmation tripwires that formalize a decision made weeks earlier. Class them as confirmatory, never as leading.
Lincoln Murphy's Success Milestones frame is the standing caution over the whole exercise: usage is not success. Track progress toward the customer's own outcome, because accounts can look busy right up to an "unexpected" churn.
This skill ends at a ranked, validated signal register; whoever assembles those signals into a composite score - weighting, score scales, red/yellow/green tiers - or the CSM playbooks, save offers, and renewal plays that act on them should use mbfinotti/revops-skills@customer-health-score. Pipeline stage design, pre-sale lead scoring, and the sales-to-CS handoff are also out of scope.