The Proof/ Case study
How Acorn built a churn model for a publicly traded global B2B SaaS company that identified customers who would churn 85-90% of the time, and found that inactive customers were the ones at risk.
B2B enterprise, publicly traded
The client was moving from a primarily on-premise offering to a cloud-based subscription and needed to assess risks such as customer churn, subscription renewal, upgrading and downgrading.
It was concerned about the unreliability of its customer attrition forecasts. Acorn found there was no churn assessment model, data availability was limited, and there were internal process gaps and inconsistent documentation.
Acorn worked with key stakeholders and built a model that predicts customer engagement using tracking and benchmarking techniques, filling the gaps in the available data.
The model's main principles contradicted the client's assumptions: inactive customers were at higher risk of churning, while active and engaged customers were the least likely to churn.
The model allowed the client to correctly identify a customer who will churn 85-90% of the time.
The work also gave the client an improved assessment of customer engagement and a data-driven approach to benchmarking, which customer success managers and directors used to improve customer engagement and support.
Customer success teams that need to know which accounts are at risk, and that suspect their current attrition forecasts are unreliable.