Churn
Churn is the percentage of customers — or of revenue — lost in a period. It is the metric that decides whether a subscription business genuinely grows: with high churn, every new customer only fills the hole left by another.
What is churn?
Churn is the percentage of customers — or of revenue — lost in a period. It is the metric that decides whether a subscription business genuinely grows: with high churn, every new customer only fills the hole left by another.
Also: churn rate · cancellation rate · attrition
Customer churn and revenue churn
They are not the same figure and they get confused constantly. Customer churn counts heads; revenue churn counts euros. Losing ten small customers and one large one gives a similar customer churn and a very different revenue churn. When you sell to companies, revenue churn is the one to watch.
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
It is the connection between support and the business. A bad support experience rarely causes a cancellation on its own, but it is what confirms the decision of somebody already wavering. And silent churn — the customers who never wrote — is what no support team sees coming, precisely because support only ever meets the people who ask.
Churn in detail
How it is calculated
Customers lost in the period over customers at the start of the period. For revenue, the same with recurring amounts. It is worth fixing whether cancellations count on the day they give notice or the day they stop paying, because the difference shifts the figure by a whole month.
Negative churn
The case where expansion from the customers who stay exceeds what is lost from the ones who leave. It is the best place a SaaS can be, and it is more common in businesses where the customer grows with usage.
What support can do
Two specific things. Spot early signals — a drop in usage, a repeated complaint, a contact who stops replying — and remove friction from the tasks a customer does just before renewing. Neither of them shows up in a ticket report.
How Intake handles it
Questions about churn
What counts as acceptable churn in SaaS?
Industry benchmarks vary so much by segment and average price that comparing against them misleads. What is useful is watching your own trend and separating customer churn from revenue churn: when you sell to companies, the second is what decides.
Does support affect churn?
It does, though it is rarely the sole cause. It tends to be the factor that confirms a decision already made. The most measurable effect runs the other way: resolving quickly whatever blocks a customer stops the doubt turning into distrust.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
MRR — Monthly recurring revenue
MRR is the sum of recurring revenue a subscription business bills each month, normalising annual contracts to their monthly equivalent. It excludes anything that does not repeat — implementations, consulting, one-off charges — because its job is to measure the stable base.
Onboarding
Onboarding is the process that takes a customer from signing up to getting their first real result with the product. It covers the initial setup, the data import, training the team and everything else needed for usage to become routine.
CSM — Customer Success Manager
A Customer Success Manager (CSM) is the person responsible for making sure a customer gets the outcome they signed up for. They work proactively across a book of accounts, own adoption, retention and expansion, and their success is measured in renewals, not in closed tickets.
NPS — Net Promoter Score
NPS measures how willing a customer is to recommend a company. It is asked on a zero-to-ten scale and calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors — zero to six — from the percentage of promoters — nine and ten. The result runs from −100 to 100, and the sevens and eights do not count.
Contact rate
Contact rate is how many support questions a business generates relative to its size: normally tickets per customer per month, or per hundred active customers. It is the metric that says whether support will scale with the business or suffocate it.
Runway
Runway is how many months a company can keep operating on the money it has, at the current rate of spend. It is calculated by dividing available cash by what gets burned each month, and it is the figure that orders every other decision.
