Case study · Subscription retention
How Audrey led an omni-channel premium brand to stop running a “leaky funnel” — and turned customer retention into a company-wide priority.
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The challenge
The brand was growing fast, at more than 85% a year, but beneath that growth it became clear they were really operating what I call a “leaky funnel”. They were investing so much into customer acquisition, but only achieving sub-optimal lifetime value (LTV) because they were losing customers within the year — despite their product category being a sticky one by design, a product that meets a daily need.
Subscription churn had climbed above 14%, well above their vertical’s benchmark churn rate. At that growth rate, every point of churn meant real lost lifetime value and wasted acquisition spend. No one at the company had systematically and objectively identified why customers were churning and when. Cue my entry…
What I did
I ran discovery across the organization: cancellation reasons, support tickets, subscription data and conversations with frontline CX agents — bringing in internal stakeholders (my peers) but also objective multi-source data into one view. Then I mapped the subscriber journey from first order to cancellation. The one insight that surprised people most: churn wasn’t going to be fixed by one person, it was going to require cross-functional alignment and effort.
I stood up a cross-functional task force across CX, marketing, product, operations and packaging. I had the data to show that no single team could fix it alone, and so I secured leadership’s buy-in and confidence on how we would reach record retention rates TOGETHER.
Instead of one big overhaul, I ranked the friction points by impact and effort and ran a structured set of experiments, each with a clear success measure.
Each one turned a reason to cancel into a reason to stay.
The fixes
Changing, pausing or skipping an order was hard enough that cancelling looked like the easy way out to a frustrated customer. Making it simple to adjust a subscription turned many would-be cancellations into pauses and swaps.
A new subscription portal design that prioritized clear actions and aligned to how customers thought (e.g. calendar dates, not weeks or months) was a high-impact change. And now, with AI, it’s an even lower-lift change.
Customers were cancelling over questions the website should have answered, such as feeding amounts, switching between formulas and ingredients. Clearer product information prevented mismatched expectations before they turned into cancellations.
Receiving leaky products was a real reason for customers churning. No one was comfortable using a product that had been compromised during shipment, and the last thing they wanted to do was now run to the store last-minute for their pet because the product was no good. Not to mention: Brand trust is compromised and the company’s CX costs are quickly driven up when 30% of call volume is attributed to damaged shipments.
I learned more about Shipping, Ops, and Warehouse practices than I ever thought I would. And it turned out, the easiest fix was one I observed when I received my son’s shampoo. Preventing a product leak during shipment was probably the most impactful thing that the company could have done, and we shipped (pun intended) this change within 4 weeks!
The results
How I’d run this today with AI
The core of this work hasn’t changed: listen to customers, find the friction, test your fixes. What has changed is speed. Today I’d use AI for retention to: