How Do SaaS Companies Understand Churn? Insights from an IcebergIQ Survey

Understanding customer churn is crucial for SaaS Customer Success teams. To delve into churn analysis practices, IcebergIQ recently surveyed 178 CS professionals*. This benchmarking survey uncovered common practices and also highlighted challenges that teams face as they seek to understand churn.

Below are a few of the questions we asked. To get the full report, download it here.

Do You Talk to Your Churned Customers?

A significant 75% of respondents engage directly with churned customers to understand their reasons for leaving. Results were fairly consistent across different company sizes.

Benchmarking Insight: The majority of CS teams, regardless of size, engage in churn analysis. Teams not conducting such analysis are in the minority. Most teams (90%) conduct in-house analysis, and 10% use third-party services.

How confident are you that you are uncovering the true reasons for churn?

Despite efforts, just 24% of teams feel “extremely” or “very confident” in their understanding of churn reasons.

Benchmarking Insight: If you are uncertain you’re getting the full story of why a customer churned, you are not alone.

IcebergIQ Insight: Understanding churn is challenging but essential. Accurate insights are crucial for strategic decision-making.

What are your top challenges to learning about churn?

Each respondent was allowed to select up to two options.

Respondents struggled most with convincing former customers to participate, but actioning and analyzing results were also noted.

Benchmarking Insight: Conducting churn analysis in-house requires significant time and resources. It starts with convincing former customers to participate, which involves identifying which customers to contact, gathering contact information, and reaching out via email or another method.

IcebergIQ Insight: Working with a third party frees up CS teams to put their time where it is most valuable – actioning insights. At IcebergIQ, we handle booking interviews and analyzing findings. Our recruiters conduct a cadence of personalized touches that typically result in 30% of contacts being successfully scheduled for interviews. We then apply a specialized methodology to analyze findings and surface top trends and themes.

Read the rest of the survey: Download here

Survey Notes

*178 responses includes 131 complete responses and 38 partial responses over a two-day period at Gainsight’s recent Pulse 2024 conference in St. Louis, as well as 9 responses from other sources (LinkedIn, Slack CS Collective).