/suede-churn-prevention

name: suede-churn-prevention
description: "Suede AI retention discipline for voluntary and involuntary churn: transparent cancel flows that meet current cancellation law, pause and downgrade paths, reason-matched save offers, failed payment recovery with smart retries and dunning, health scores and proactive signals, and win-back design. Use when diagnosing subscriber loss or designing a bounded retention intervention. NOT FOR: writing the lifecycle emails themselves (use suede-emails), pricing architecture (use suede-pricing), paywall design (use suede-paywalls), or event instrumentation (use suede-analytics)."
metadata:
  version: 2.1.0

Suede AI Churn Prevention

Use this retention playbook to reduce voluntary and involuntary churn through transparent cancel flows, bounded save offers, proactive signals, and payment recovery.

Before Starting

**Check for product marketing context first:** If `.agents/product-marketing.md` exists (or `.claude/product-marketing.md`, or the legacy `product-marketing-context.md` filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task.

Gather this context (ask if not provided):

1. Current Churn Situation

• What's your monthly churn rate? (Voluntary vs. involuntary if known)
• How many active subscribers?
• What's the average MRR per customer?
• Do you have a cancel flow today, or does cancel happen instantly?

2. Billing & Platform

• What billing provider? (Stripe, Chargebee, Paddle, Recurly, Braintree)
• Monthly, annual, or both billing intervals?
• Do you support plan pausing or downgrades?
• Any existing retention tooling? (Churnkey, ProsperStack, Raaft)

3. Product & Usage Data

• Do you track feature usage per user?
• Can you identify engagement drop-offs?
• Do you have cancellation reason data from past churns?
• What's your activation metric? (What do retained users do that churned users don't?)

4. Constraints

• B2B or B2C? (Affects flow design)
• Which states and countries are customers in? (California and other automatic

renewal laws require online cancellation; see Cancellation law below)

• Brand tone for offboarding? (Empathetic, direct, playful)

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How This Skill Works

Churn has two types requiring different strategies:

| Type | Cause | Solution | |------|-------|----------| | **Voluntary** | Customer chooses to cancel | Cancel flows, save offers, exit surveys | | **Involuntary** | Payment fails | Dunning emails, smart retries, card updaters |

Voluntary churn is typically 50-70% of total churn. Involuntary churn is 30-50% but is often easier to fix.

This skill supports three modes:

1. **Build a cancel flow**: Design from scratch with survey, save offers, and confirmation 2. **Optimize an existing flow**: Analyze cancel data and improve save rates 3. **Set up dunning**: Failed payment recovery with retries and email sequences

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Cancel Flow Design

The Cancel Flow Structure

Every cancel flow follows this sequence:

Trigger → Survey → Dynamic Offer → Confirmation → Post-Cancel

**Step 1: Trigger** Customer clicks "Cancel subscription" in account settings.

**Step 2: Exit Survey** Ask why they're cancelling. This determines which save offer to show.

**Step 3: Dynamic Save Offer** Present a targeted offer based on their reason (discount, pause, downgrade, etc.)

**Step 4: Confirmation** If they still want to cancel, confirm clearly with end-of-billing-period messaging.

**Step 5: Post-Cancel** Set expectations, offer easy reactivation path, trigger win-back sequence.

Exit Survey Design

The exit survey is the foundation. Good reason categories:

| Reason | What It Tells You | |--------|-------------------| | Too expensive | Price sensitivity, may respond to discount or downgrade | | Not using it enough | Low engagement, may respond to pause or onboarding help | | Missing a feature | Product gap, show roadmap or workaround | | Switching to competitor | Competitive pressure, understand what they offer | | Technical issues / bugs | Product quality, escalate to support | | Temporary / seasonal need | Usage pattern, offer pause | | Business closed / changed | Unavoidable, learn and let go gracefully | | Other | Catch-all, include free text field |

**Survey best practices:**

• 1 question, single-select with optional free text
• 5-8 reason options max (avoid decision fatigue)
• Put most common reasons first (review data quarterly)
• Don't make it feel like a guilt trip
• "Help us improve" framing works better than "Why are you leaving?"

Dynamic Save Offers

The key insight: **match the offer to the reason.** A discount won't save someone who isn't using the product. A feature roadmap won't save someone who can't afford it.

**Offer-to-reason mapping:**

| Cancel Reason | Primary Offer | Fallback Offer | |---------------|---------------|----------------| | Too expensive | Discount (20-30% for 2-3 months) | Downgrade to lower plan | | Not using it enough | Pause (1-3 months) | Free onboarding session | | Missing feature | Roadmap preview + timeline | Workaround guide | | Switching to competitor | Competitive comparison + discount | Feedback session | | Technical issues | Escalate to support immediately | Credit + priority fix | | Temporary / seasonal | Pause subscription | Downgrade temporarily | | Business closed | Skip offer (respect the situation) | n/a |

Save Offer Types

**Discount**

• 20-30% off for 2-3 months is the sweet spot
• Avoid 50%+ discounts (trains customers to cancel for deals)
• Time-limit the offer ("This offer expires when you leave this page")
• Show the dollar amount saved, not just the percentage

**Pause subscription**

• 1-3 month pause maximum (longer pauses rarely reactivate)
• 60-80% of pausers eventually return to active
• Auto-reactivation with advance notice email
• Keep their data and settings intact

**Plan downgrade**

• Offer a lower tier instead of f