Acquire and improve skills
to build and grow products

A team we know well set out to improve customer retention in an online service. Their plan was to build an ML system that could predict which customers were likely to churn before their subscription renewal came up, and then offer those users a timely discount to encourage them to stay.

While training the model, the team’s primary focus was prediction accuracy—the percentage of churning customers correctly identified ahead of time. Their key business metric was the overall customer retention rate.

The first iteration looked like a success. They deployed the system, started targeting predicted churners with discounts, and watched the overall retention numbers rise. A win, right?