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In the last decade, Iʼve spent my days talking to leaders who own the retention problem in retail, subscription, travel, telco, financial services, you name it. Iʼve been inside hundreds of demos, heard thousands of stories, and seen a clear pattern emerge.
Almost every company claims to be “listening to the customer.ˮ They have surveys, dashboards and have data science teams running churn models. And yet... churn is stubborn. Retention rates are flat or slipping.
The question is: “How can you be listening to customers, and still be losing them?ˮ
The Real Cost of Flat Retention
Retention is the compounding engine of growth. A small lift, even 5% can drive massive profit gains. But most leaders I speak to admit: itʼs getting harder, not easier, to keep customers.
Across industries, customers are churning silently. They stop buying, downgrade, and cancel often without ever filling out a survey. The cost is staggering: trillions in lost lifetime value globally.
The reality is, a lot of companies do know who is leaving. They have cancellation data, cohort analysis, and CRM notes. Some even have sophisticated scoring models from their data teams.
But knowing who is leaving isnʼt enough. If you donʼt have the “whyˮ in the customerʼs own words, at the moment itʼs happening, you canʼt meaningfully change the outcome.
If you donʼt have the why and have it at the moment theyʼre at risk, you canʼt meaningfully change the outcome. Without that context, youʼre left optimising after the fact rather than preventing the loss in the first place.
The blind spot is timing and depth. Many teams only uncover the why weeks later, filtered through surveys or static reports. By then, the customer is long gone and the insight is reduced to an average on a slide deck. The richness of the original conversation, the emotional cues, the specific trigger all of it is lost.
Where traditional VoC strategies fall short for Retention
Hereʼs the gap I keep seeing:
Low coverage and bias
Surveys might get 10%-30% of customers to respond, but it’s mostly skewed toward extreme sentiment. That leaves the majority, including many who churn unheard.
Slow signals
If it takes weeks or months to see the patterns behind cancellations, that cohort of customers is already gone.
Siloed insights
Support teams see issues in tickets. Product teams see them in bug logs. Marketing might spot sentiment shifts on social. Rarely is this stitched together in real time for a unified retention play.
A retention leader at a high-growth subscription brand told me recently, “We know our churn score for each cohort. We even test interventions. But we still miss things that only show up in conversations - a tone shift, repeated frustration with a feature, the way they describe us to friends. Thatʼs the stuff we canʼt get from numbers alone.ˮ
“We know our churn score for each cohort. We even test interventions. But we still miss things that only show up in conversations - a tone shift, repeated frustration with a feature, the way they describe us to friends. Thatʼs the stuff we canʼt get from numbers alone.ˮ
The Human Cost of Missed Signals
Iʼve seen three patterns repeat across industries:
The slow-burning dissatisfaction
A subscription brand thought churn was driven by price sensitivity. In reality, customers were quietly frustrated with a recurring product defect.
Support teams heard it daily. It never made it to leadership until the churn spike was already underway.
The silent process blocker
A leading fashion retailer had a strong loyalty program. Retention dipped for a segment of long-time customers. Cancellation reasons were marked as “moved to competitorˮ in the CRM.
Only by listening to call transcripts did they realise that a change in their next-day delivery fee was tripping customers up, and nobody had flagged it formally.
The region-specific loyalty leak
A global consumer goods brand saw steady retention overall, but a particular region underperformed for months. Internal data pointed to “market saturation.ˮ
Support transcripts revealed a more human truth: deliveries were consistently arriving damaged because of a local courier issue. That courier wasnʼt on the radar of anyone making retention decisions.
These arenʼt exotic scenarios. They happen everywhere, every week.
Two Camps of Retention Leaders
Over the years, I’ve come to see two distinct camps:
- Camp 1:
The “good” retention operators. They have churn models, cohort analysis, and dashboards. They act quickly when their metrics move. Bu they’re often reacting to churn that’s already happened. - Camp 2:
The truly customer-obsessed. They treat qualitative feedback, i.e support tickets, call transcripts, chat logs, reviews, and social comments as equally important as quantitative data. They monitor it daily. They spot patterns early enough to act before the churn event.
The difference between the two? Camp 2 closes the gap between customer reality and company response in days, sometimes hours.
So, which camp are you in?
What Customer-Obsessed Leaders Do Differently
From my conversations, here’s what sets them apart:
They treat retention as a daily discipline
Not a quarterly metric review. They want to see churn risks emerging live, while there’s still time to do something.
They listen to every signal
A cancellation reason code is not the same as hearing a customer explain in their own words why they’ve lost faith. Emotional signals surface in
conversations long before they show up in your churn model.
They break down silos
They don’t let CX, product, and marketing run separate feedback loops. Everyone sees the same drivers. Everyone can act.
They empower immediate action
They don’t just share reports, they connect insights to playbooks, workflows, and interventions that happen instantly.
Why This Matters Now
Retention has moved to the top of the CEO agenda. In this year alone, I’ve had more CEOs in our demos than in the previous five combined. The message is clear: profitable growth depends on keeping customers, not just acquiring them.
At the same time, there’s growing fatigue with legacy VoC platforms. Leaders are frustrated with slow, survey-heavy, siloed systems that promise insight but rarely move the retention needle.
And finally, AI has made the impossible possible, parsing millions of conversations in real time, surfacing the “why” behind churn, and triggering action automatically. The tech barrier is gone. The only question is whether companies will close the gap between hearing customers and keeping them.
The Challenge
If you run a VoC or retention program today, here’s my challenge to you:
- Can you tell me right now the top three emerging drivers of churn in your business this week?
- Can your CX, product, and marketing teams all see that same answer without a meeting?
- Can you act on it today, not next quarter?
If the answer is no, you’re not alone — but you’re also in danger of becoming irrelevant to your customers.
The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that close the distance between customer reality and company action. Everyone else will keep “listening”… and keep losing customers.
