Customer Success Glossary

Customer Churn Rate

Manage and reduce your customer churn rate with Gainsight

At its core, a business’ churn rate represents the speed at which its customers are leaving.
Gainsight’s Essential Guide to Churn

Churn can be both stress-inducing and confusing, but it’s a necessary metric to indicate business health. Before you start calculating, it’s important to differentiate between your avoidable and unavoidable churn.

Avoidable churn rate: Includes instances of churn that can be remedied when the customer rediscovers value in your product/service.

Unavoidable churn rate: Includes instances of churn that cannot be remedied. What counts as unavoidable churn varies across businesses but can include when a sponsor moves companies, a customer goes out of business, or if a customer gets acquired.

Gainsight is the central source for your customer data, so it should be your go-to for churn-related information. With Gainsight you can:

  • Know how a customer is using your product with Customer Scorecards that create a health score based on product usage, survey responses, and support tickets
  • Proactively combat churn with alerts that trigger 90-days before a renewal date, giving you adequate time to address any concerns or struggles
  • Track the progress of renewals in Cockpit
  • Create personalized best practice Playbooks that guide customer success managers and account owners through step-by-step renewal processes

Understand your customer churn rate to improve business health

The term “churn” describes the loss of customers who don’t resign their contract at the time of their renewal. This could mean many things—they found a different product better suited to their needs, they’re dissatisfied with their experience, your price point is too high, they’re under new management, etc.

Customer churn rate is just one of the ways to look at your company’s churn and business health. It focuses on, you guessed it, the number of customers that churn. Revenue churn rates are similar but instead, they focus on the contract amount each customer represents. These rates will differ because certain customers could have more expensive contracts than others.

For an in-depth look at how to calculate customer churn and revenue churn, check out our Essential Guide to Churn. You’ll find a wealth of equations, examples, and explanations.

Sign up for a demo today to learn more about how Gainsight can help decrease your customer churn rate.