• Carl Gold is the Chief Data Scientist at Zuora, Inc. where he created the Subscription Economy Index and the data science behind Zuora’s Subscriber Insights. He has a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and is the author of the book – Fighting Churn with Data
• Many products are subscription products, but they are unlike the original utilities like gas or electricity, which were first, without alternatives, and also consumed every month. Now there are alternatives to most SAAS products, and moreover often not utilities that must be consumed every day.
• Customers churn when they realize that they are not getting the expected value from a product or service. And although it is possible to see that a customer is possibly not deriving value, it is hard to predict when the churn will come, because that depends on many factors, such as when the customer finds a better alternative.
• Customer success is the key factor in retention and avoiding churn. But to think of customer success a business has to reach a certain stage of maturity. Customer success is the pro-active version of customer support. In customer support, the customer calls in for support. In Customer Success, the seller calls the customer to see if they can support with training if they feel that the customer is not taking full advantage of the product.
• Particular levels of certain healthy behaviors, mined from historical data, can be used to understand customer behavior to better predict and fight churn. Data of at least 100 churns are necessary to understand the underlying cause and use that to fight churn.

These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories 

Run time – 36.46 mins.