Most churn “comes out of nowhere” only because the signals are scattered.
Support has the conversations. Sales/CS has the account context. Finance sees billing friction. Ops has the spreadsheets. When those aren’t connected, you’re left with gut feelings.
Here’s a common setup we see in growing teams:
- Intercom for support + customer messaging
- Salesforce for accounts, renewals, and ownership
- Stripe for subscriptions and payment health
- Google Sheets for lightweight playbooks and operational notes
The 5 signals that predict churn early
You don’t need a complicated model to start—just a reliable, unified view:
- Support volume spike on a single account (or repeated issue categories)
- Slow resolution (time-to-first-response and time-to-close trending up)
- Billing friction (failed payments, retries, increasing dunning)
- Engagement drop (fewer key actions, fewer active users)
- Renewal proximity without a clear success plan
The weekly ritual (what teams actually do with this)
Instead of hunting through tools, run a 30-minute weekly review:
- Top 10 at-risk accounts (by signal score)
- “What changed?” summary (new issues, billing events, usage changes)
- Assign next actions (CSM outreach, product fix, billing follow-up)
- Track outcomes (did risk reduce after the action?)
This turns customer health into an operating system—not a report.
Why DIY approaches usually stall
It’s not hard to export CSVs. It’s hard to keep the view correct over time:
- Identity mapping (account ↔ users ↔ billing customer ↔ conversations)
- Process drift (tags, teams, lifecycle stages evolve)
- Backfills (new rules require historical rebuilds)
- Reliability (missed loads quietly produce bad decisions)
With our managed data platform, the ingestion and monitoring are handled so your team can focus on reducing churn.
Where spreadsheets still fit (and where they don’t)
Sheets are great for playbooks and notes. They’re risky as the source of truth for analytics because versioning and formulas drift—especially once you need history and segmentation.