Churn rate

Churn rate (sometimes called attrition rate) is a measure of the proportion of individuals or items moving out of a group over a specific period. It is one of two primary factors that determine the steady-state level of customers a business will support. Churn is widely applied in business for contractual customer bases. Examples include a subscriber-based service model as used by mobile telephone networks and pay TV operators. The term is often synonymous with turnover, for example participant turnover in peer-to-peer networks. Churn rate is an input into customer lifetime value modeling, and can be part of a simulator used to measure return on marketing investment using marketing mix modeling. The term comes from the image of agitation of cream in a butter churn. Customer attrition Churn rate, when applied to a customer base, is the proportion of contractual customers or subscribers who leave a supplier during a given period. It may indicate of customer dissatisfaction, cheaper and/or better offers from the competition, more successful sales and/or marketing by the competition, or reasons having to do with the customer life cycle. Churn is closely related to the concept of average customer life time. For example, an annual churn rate of 25 percent implies an average customer life of four years. An annual churn rate of 33 percent implies an average customer life of three years. The churn rate can be minimized by creating barriers which discourage customers to change suppliers (contractual binding periods, use of proprietary technology, value-added services, unique business models, etc.), or through retention activities such as loyalty programs. It is possible to overstate the churn rate, as when a consumer drops the service but then restarts it within the same year. Thus, a clear distinction needs to be made between "gross churn", the total number of absolute disconnections, and "net churn", the overall loss of subscribers or members. The difference between the two measures is the number of new subscribers or members that have joined during the same period.