Your exit survey results are in. The top reason customers give for cancelling is "too expensive." So your team debates a price cut. But when you dig deeper — talking to churned users, analysing their usage patterns, examining when they stopped engaging — a different picture emerges. Most of these users never activated the features that justify the price. They did not think it was too expensive. They thought it was not worth the price because they never experienced the full value.
Churn analysis is the discipline of investigating why customers leave. It goes far beyond calculating a churn rate. The real work is distinguishing the surface reasons people give from the root causes that drove their decision. When you understand root causes, you can fix the right problems instead of chasing symptoms.
The Core Idea
Churn comes in several flavours. Logo churn counts how many customers you lose. Revenue churn counts how much revenue walks out the door. Net revenue churn factors in expansion revenue from existing customers, which can sometimes offset losses. Each tells a different story. Losing ten small accounts is different from losing one enterprise customer, even if the logo count looks worse.