Overview
Churn tracking is a small set of fields on the customer record where an account manager records a churn risk they have identified, with enough structure to be useful later: how severe it is, when it might happen, what it is worth, and why.
It is deliberately manual. Nothing detects churn for you and nothing sets these fields automatically. The value is in having a consistent place to record a risk at the moment you spot it, rather than in an email thread or someone's head.
The fields
Field | What it is for |
Churn Risk Active (Yes or No) | The master switch, and the only churn field that affects the score. Yes means this customer has a live churn risk. |
Churn Risk Level | High, Medium or Low. How serious the risk is. |
Expected Timescale | 0 to 3 months, 3 to 6 months, 6 months or more, or Unknown. When you expect it to happen if nothing changes. |
Commercial Impact | Revenue at risk if the customer leaves, as a number. |
Churn Reason | A list your administrator controls. The supplied starting list is Price, Service issues, Competitor offer, Business change or closure, Consolidation, and Other. |
Churn Notes | Free text for the story and any mitigation plan. |
Churn Last Updated | Maintained for you. It follows the last time any churn field changed, so it cannot drift out of step with the data. Do not type into it. |
How it affects the score
One check reads this: No active churn risk flagged. It fails while Churn Risk Active is Yes, and passes when it is No or has never been set. The other fields appear in the check's evidence on the panel, so a colleague hovering the check sees the level, timescale, value and reason without opening anything, but they do not change the number.
That means one field costs one check. On a company scoring 21 checks that is roughly five points. The point is not the arithmetic: it is that a flagged customer stops looking healthy while the risk is open.
Recording and clearing a risk
Set Churn Risk Active to Yes as soon as you have a real reason to think the customer might leave.
Fill in level, timescale, commercial impact and reason. Use the notes for what happened and what you are doing about it.
Keep the notes current as the situation develops. The last updated date follows your edits.
Set Churn Risk Active back to No when the risk is mitigated, or when the customer has actually left and the account is being closed down. Clearing it is a deliberate act: nothing expires it for you.
Good practice
Flag early. A risk recorded at the first sign is useful. One recorded the week before notice is just paperwork.
Put a number on it. Commercial impact is what lets someone prioritise attention across a portfolio.
Write the notes for someone else. Assume the person reading them has not spoken to the customer.
Ask your administrator to adjust the reason list if the supplied one does not match how your business talks about churn. It is configuration, not code.
Reporting on it
These are ordinary custom fields, so they work everywhere fields work: customer grids, exports, reporting, and automations. You can list every customer with an active churn risk, total the revenue at risk, or trigger an automation when the flag is set.
Support
Support page: thelayer.com/support
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 03333 222 000