The Customer Value Report answers three questions about your customer base: how long do customers stay with you, how many leave each month or year, and what is a customer worth over their whole time with you.
It is built to work even if you don't use the Cancel option. Many companies simply switch a customer to Non-Active when they leave, which the older cancellation reports can't see. This report counts those departures too.
To open it, go to Reports → Customer Value Report.
Filters
- As of – the date the report is calculated for. It defaults to today; if you pick a future date, today is used instead.
- Show churn – Month by month or Year by year. Monthly is the default, and it gives newer companies a churn rate after their first few months instead of waiting for a full season.
- Measure churn over – how many years of history to measure churn across (1 to 10 years, default 3).
- Treat as quiet after – how long an Active customer can go without a completed service before the report flags them as having gone quiet (12, 18 or 24 months, default 12).
Click Run report to apply your filters. The report keeps recent results for a few hours to stay fast; click Refresh data to recalculate from your latest records. Download customer CSV exports one row per customer.
The four tabs
- Retention – your annual retention and churn rates, churn for each month or year, and how many customers come back for a second season.
- Customers – every customer with their status, when they started, their last activity, what they've paid and their lifetime value.
- Lifetime Value – the average value of a customer, of a brand-new customer, and of your whole book, with a likely range.
- Data Quality – how complete your records are, where the numbers may be less reliable, and which payments were left out of revenue.
Definitions
- Departed – a customer who has been marked Non-Active, or whose properties have all been canceled. Going a long time without a service does not on its own count as leaving.
- Departure date – the date the customer was marked Non-Active. If there's no record of that change, and all of their properties were canceled, the property cancel date is used instead.
- Undated departure – a departed customer with no recorded date for either of the above. These can't be placed in a particular month or year, so they're left out of the churn rate and counted separately on the Data Quality tab.
- Quiet customer – an Active customer with no completed service within your Treat as quiet after period. They still count as current customers, because nobody recorded them leaving, but their projected value is reduced to reflect that they may not return, and they stop counting toward the churn rate after their last activity. Customers On-Hold are never counted as quiet.
- Churn rate – the share of customers who left during a period, out of everyone who was a customer during it. The current month or year is shown but not counted, because it isn't over yet. The headline figure is always shown as an annual rate, whichever view you pick.
- Revenue – money actually collected, not invoiced. Sales tax and refunds are taken out, and payments made from a customer's credit balance aren't counted twice. An unpaid invoice counts for nothing until it's paid. Payments that have no record of whether they came from a credit balance (mostly older payments the system recreated) aren't counted either, the same as in the Revenue By Service Type report. The Data Quality tab shows how many there are, what they total, and how many customers paid only that way – those customers are left out of the churn rate and lifetime value as well.
- Lifetime value – for a customer who has left, exactly what they paid. For a current customer, what they've paid so far plus their yearly revenue multiplied by how many more years they're expected to stay, based on your churn rate.
Why you might not see a churn rate
If fewer than half of the departures in your selected period have a recorded date, the report won't show a churn rate, and lifetime value projections are hidden too. Undated departures have to be left out of the calculation, and leaving them out always makes churn look lower than it really is – so rather than show a misleadingly good number, the report shows none and explains why on the Data Quality tab.
What a customer who has already left was worth is still shown, because that's based on what they actually paid.
Confidence
Each projected figure carries a Low, Medium or High confidence grade and a likely range. Confidence is lower when there's less than two years of history to measure, or when relatively few customers have been measured. It's also reduced when first-season customers leave much more often than established ones, because a single average then describes neither group well. If some departures couldn't be dated, a note says the churn rate is a minimum. When confidence is low, quote the range rather than the single number.
Things to know
- A customer who left and later came back is not counted as having left.
- If you set As of to a past date, departure dates respect that date, but whether a customer counts as departed is based on their current status. The report shows a notice when this applies.
- The Customers who have stopped figure counts every departure in your history. The number of undated departures shown under it, and the departure counts on the Data Quality tab, cover only the years you've chosen in Measure churn over.
- All dates follow your company's time zone, so a change made late in the evening is counted on the day you made it.
Getting cleaner numbers from here on
- When a customer leaves, use the Cancel option with a cancel reason rather than switching them to Non-Active. See How to Cancel a Customer Account.
- Don't go back and cancel your existing Non-Active customers. They would all get today's date as their cancel date, which would make it look as though they all left at once and distort your history.
- For a customer who is only pausing, use On-Hold instead. See How to Pause Services Using Account Hold.