Churn reports are a quick way for the management and board of directors to visualize and understand churn that has already happened, forecast future churn, and compare churn within the portfolio. They add value to customer success professionals by providing:
A concise churn summary - Executives get a consolidated report of the key churn metrics in one place
Fast, actionable insights - Understand churn sources by drilling into individual customer segments and comparing them
Better churn forecast - Better planning for future churn by enabling CSMs to capture churn risk at the account level.
Churn reports help customer success executives to report on:
Churn that already happened (Churn summary)
Forecast future churn (Churn forecast)
Compare churn within the portfolio (Churn trends)
A guide to accessing Churn reports in Freshsuccess
The Churn report is located under the Reports section of the main menu. It is available to all users. CSMs can use this report to keep track of their own accounts, while the customer success leadership can leverage this report for organization-wide trends.
The dashboard has three reports (tabs):
Churn summary
Churn forecast
Churn trends
1. Churn summary
The Churn summary report empowers you to track the existing churn of your customer base over the selected time period. The report provides easy-to-consume summaries of your total churn, churn type, churn reasons, churned accounts, and churned revenue, all calculated automatically based on the account's subscription history.
Definition of terminology on the churn summary dashboard:
Churn event type
Downgrade - the account has at least one active subscription in the selected period but the total subscription revenue has decreased.
Cancellation - the account's subscription(s) has ended in the selected period.
Churn date - the month when the subscription downgrade or cancellation event was captured
(this term will be updated to e.g. "Revenue lost month" as it is really reporting for the month and confusing to people who are also marking churn manually)
MRR/ARR lost - the amount of the MRR/ARR affected by the churn event
Churn reason - the reason for churn provided to the default category-dropdown "Churn reason" field
The churn summary dashboard has the following widgets:
Total churn - This chart provides a visual overview of overall account and revenue churn for the selected time period, i.e, number of accounts that experienced the loss of revenue, total revenue lost (absolute and percentage), and type of churn event.
Churn reason - This chart aggregates the number of accounts by churn reasons, which can be grouped by either product, tier, region, or stage.
Accounts churned - This chart shows you the count of accounts affected by either of the churn types, which can be grouped by either product, tier, region, or stage.
Revenue churned - This chart displays the total churned ARR/MRR affected by either of the churn types (cancellation or downgrade), which can be grouped by either product, tier, region, or stage.
Top churns - This table lists out all affected accounts with churn details, and is sorted by the "ARR/MRR lost" by default. You can customize the columns to display in the table.
2. Churn forecast
The Churn forecast dashboard helps you forecast how much churn you can expect in a future time period based on your CSMs' sentiment of risk and subjective input. The report provides easy-to-consume summaries of your total churn forecast, confirmed churn reason breakdown, projected churn accounts, and projected churn revenue.
The churn forecast dashboard has the following widgets:
Total churn forecast - This chart provides a quick overview of the overall churn forecast, i.e, the number of accounts predicted to churn, projected ARR/MRR churn (absolute and percentage), and breakdown of projected churn type (at-risk or confirmed).
Confirmed churn reason breakdown - This chart summarizes accounts by churn reasons, that can be grouped by either product, tier, region, or stage.
Projected accounts churned - This chart summarizes projected churn accounts by "at-risk" or "confirmed", which can be grouped by either Tier, Region, Stage or Product
Projected revenue churned - This chart summarizes the projected churn revenue, reported by either ARR or MRR based on the toggle selected.
Top projected churns - This chart lists out all the accounts that have been projected to churn, sorted by "Projected MRR" by default.
The churn forecast report is powered up by the data captured in the following four default account fields that CSMs need to fill manually. These fields can be added to the account360 overview layout by the admin for easy access:
Churn likelihood - This is a dropdown field for CSMs to flag accounts as either at-risk or confirmed churning.
Churn reason - This is a dependent dropdown that can capture *why* an account is churning across up to 3 levels of dependency.
Projected churn date - this is a date filed for CSMs to capture the projected future churn for the account.
Churn description - This is a multi-line text field for CSM to add any anecdotal detail about the customer’s decision to leave.
NOTE:
When you forecast an account to be “At-risk” or “Confirmed churn” using the Churn likelihood field, you will be prompted to set a “Projected churn date”, which will be auto-set to be the account’s next renewal date (if the subscription data is present for mapping the account next renewal date). In addition, you can choose to overwrite that date with any future date if required.
3. Churn trends
The Churn trends dashboard helps you to see how your current churn compares to churn in the past.
The churn trend dashboard contains the following widgets-
Churn Trend - This trend chart shows the historical account or revenue churn over a selected period of time that can be grouped by either Tier, Region, Stage, or Product
A table summary of the corresponding data points for each reporting time scale.
Churn reports - Filters
Use the options at the top right to group by or filter any of the reports by the date range of the report. Available options are:
Group by: product, region, tier, and stage
Toggle results between MRR or ARR
Select date range
For the Trends report, you can also select the time scale, i.e, monthly or quarterly.
The default settings for the filters are:
Group by: Tier
MRR/ARR toggle: MRR
Time period: Last quarter
Show details
Each widget has a ‘Show detail’ button to drill down. Upon clicking ‘Show detail’, a new page opens with a zoomed-in version of the chart along with tabular data of the chart at the bottom.
Build your own Churn Forecasting Reports
At this time, the churn reports and dashboards discussed in the preceding sections work solely based on subscription data.
In the absence of subscription data feeding into the churn dashboard, CSMs can build their own custom churn/at-risk forecasting reports under the Analytics module using the “Churned Accounts” metrics:
These metrics are Confirmed churn MRR, confirmed churn ARR, confirmed churn Accounts, and at-risk MRR, at-risk ARR, at-risk Accounts, which are reported when the projected churn date falls within the date range chosen in the “Configure” pane under the Analytics module.
Another workaround to the subscription data would be to manually upload the subscription data to Freshsuccess if it cannot be automated/synced from a third-party tool.
FAQs:
Q - As a CSM, can I save any reports that I have created?
A - Yes, you can save any report created after applying various filters using the ‘save as’ button on the top navigation. If you have the privilege of managing public objects, you can mark the saved view as ‘public’ or ‘private’ depending on whether you wish to make it visible to other users.
Q - Can I add a custom filter field to further filter the reports?
Only a user with ‘Manage public objects role permission’ can add a custom account field (dropdown) to further filter the Churn reports. As shown below, the option to create a custom filter becomes available to such users in the filter options.
