Proactively retain at-risk subscribers using AI churn scores

Reach high churn-risk subscribers with a retention offer inside your app, before they ever click cancel.

Overview

A Cancel Page catches subscribers who have already decided to leave. Use Deflect cancellations with a personalized cancel experience for that moment. AI Churn Scoring flags subscribers who are likely to cancel in the coming weeks, so you can intervene while a lighter-touch nudge still works, and often without a deep discount.

Chargebee provides two audience attributes for this: Churn Risk Score (a value from 1 to 100) and Churn Risk Levels (High Risk, Medium Risk, or Low Risk). High Risk maps to scores from 70 to 100.

In this tutorial, you create an audience of high churn-risk subscribers in Chargebee Growth, build a Retention in-app offer, and run a Retention play that presents the offer inside your application. You reserve a control group so you can measure the lift the play generates.

What you get: An in-product intervention that reaches at-risk subscribers, identified using Chargebee's churn propensity scores, upstream of the cancel button, where saves are cheaper and less discount-heavy.

Before you start

1. Connect Growth and Billing. Make sure Chargebee Growth is enabled and connected to your Chargebee Billing site.
2. Integrate Growth with your application. Have your app development team follow the In-app Offers Quickstart to integrate Growth with your application so offers can be presented to users in your app. Alternatively, to control where offers are presented and fully customize their look and feel, use the Offers APIs.
3. Join the AI Churn Scores early access program. AI Churn Scores are available only for Chargebee Billing customers during the EAP period. At least 90 days of billing data is required to generate reliable scores, and only active paying customers with sufficient billing history are scored.
4. Create a coupon in Billing. If you're offering a discount, create the coupon you want to apply in Chargebee Billing, for example, 30% off for three months. Set the discount type and duration here. This is what the offer applies to when a subscriber accepts.
5. Make sure subscribers have a payment method on file. If your retention offer applies a billing change (such as a discount) on acceptance, Growth uses the payment source on file. Subscribers without a stored payment method can't complete the change automatically.

Implementation steps

Follow these steps to target at-risk subscribers with a proactive retention offer.

1. Create an audience of high churn-risk subscribers

Target the subscribers AI Churn Scoring flags as most likely to cancel. Create an audience:

1. In Growth, go to People > Audiences.

2. Create a new audience with a condition on the churn risk property surfaced by AI Churn Scoring:

   • Property: Churn Risk Levels
   • Operator: Is
   • Value: High Risk

   You can instead use Churn Risk Score with Is greater than or equal to and a numeric threshold, such as 70.

3. Optionally add conditions to focus on accounts worth a proactive offer, such as a minimum plan value or tenure.

4. Select Done to save the audience.

2. Create the retention offer

Build the in-app offer you want at-risk subscribers to see.

1. In Growth, go to Offers > In-app.
2. Select + New Offer.
3. On the Choose your offer objective prompt, select Retention.
4. On the Choose your widget prompt, select Banner for a lighter prompt or Modal for a more prominent one.
5. On the Choose your offer category prompt, select the intervention you want to test, such as Discount or Training & Support.
6. Under Button > Settings, if the offer applies a billing change, set Button processing to Billing integration and configure the action. For a non-billing nudge, such as booking a call, point the button to the relevant destination.
7. In the editor, edit the offer copy and CTA so it reads as helpful rather than a last-ditch save, for example "Getting the most out of your plan?" with a CTA of "Show me how".
8. Select Done, and then on the Publish changes immediately prompt, select Publish now.

3. Create a Retention play to present the offer

Run a play that shows the offer to your at-risk audience inside your application.

1. In Growth, go to Plays > Retention.
2. Select + Create New Play, select the In-app Offer play type, and then select Proceed.
3. Under Choose your Audience, select the high churn-risk audience you created in step 1.
4. Under Select Trigger, select Any Page Load to evaluate eligibility on each visit, or Custom Page Load to limit the offer to a specific page such as your dashboard.
5. Select Targeting & Experimentation.
6. Under Control, reserve a percentage of the audience as a holdout so you can measure the lift the play generates.
7. Under Actions, select Simple actions and select the retention offer you created in step 2.
8. Select Review & Publish, set the play Priority, and then select Publish Play.

Result

High churn-risk subscribers now see your retention offer inside your application, ahead of any cancellation, while subscribers in the control group don't. To see how the play is performing, go to Plays > Retention and open reports from the menu next to the play. The KPI bar and play list surface the play's key metrics, such as customers engaged, accepts, and offer acceptance rate.

Summary

In this tutorial, you learned how to:

• Create an audience of high churn-risk subscribers using the churn risk property from AI Churn Scoring.
• Build a Retention in-app offer designed as an early, helpful intervention.
• Run a Retention play that presents the offer in your application, with a control group to measure lift.
• Use play reports to confirm the proactive offer reduces churn.