---
name: retention
description: Diagnoses and reduces churn — cancellation flows, save offers, failed-payment recovery, at-risk detection, and the product and service causes underneath. Use this when churn is rising or unexplained, to design a cancellation or win-back flow, to recover involuntary churn, to identify at-risk accounts before they leave, or to decide whether a retention problem is a product problem.
---

# Retention

## Separate the two churns first

They have nothing in common but the outcome, and conflating them wastes effort:

- **Involuntary** — payment failed. Often a large share of total churn, entirely mechanical, and the
  cheapest thing to fix in the whole business.
- **Voluntary** — they chose to leave.

Fix involuntary first. Card retries on a sensible schedule, dunning emails that reach a human,
pre-expiry notification, and a grace period that does not immediately cut off access. This is
recoverable revenue sitting untouched in most companies.

## Diagnosing voluntary churn

Ask when the decision was actually made. It is almost never at cancellation — it is weeks earlier,
at a failed expectation, an unresolved support issue, or a champion leaving.

Segment churn by tenure, plan, acquisition channel, and activation status. Concentrations tell you
the cause:

- **Early churn** — activation problem, not retention. Fix onboarding.
- **Churn at renewal** — value not visible enough to justify the line item.
- **Churn after a specific event** — find the event: a price change, an outage, a redesign, a
  champion departure.
- **Churn concentrated in one channel** — an acquisition problem. You are buying the wrong
  customers, and no retention work fixes that.

## Cancellation flow

Make canceling straightforward. Obstruction generates chargebacks, public complaints, and in a
growing number of jurisdictions, regulatory exposure.

Do ask why, with specific options plus free text — this is the highest-quality product feedback you
will ever receive, from people with no reason to be polite.

Offer a save only where it addresses the stated reason. A discount offered to someone leaving
because a feature is missing confirms you were not listening. Pause is often the better offer and is
rarely available.

## At-risk detection

Build a simple signal from declining usage, a support escalation, a champion going quiet, or a seat
count dropping. Then act on it while intervention is still possible — a health score nobody works is
a dashboard, not a program.

## Sources

`references/sources.md` in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions
here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before
answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free
to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.

## Never

- Count a saved cancellation as retained without checking whether they stayed a quarter later.
- Treat retention as a service problem when the data says it is a product or acquisition problem.
- Make cancellation require a phone call.