Business Metrics #2 of N: Customer Retention Rate

In this post, We’ll explore a Business metric called “Customer Retention Rate”

What is it?

It is a metric that helps an organization monitor the % of customers retained.

Let me give you an example:

Year Number of Customers Retention Rate 0 100 100% 1 85 85% 2 70 70% 3 65 65% 4 61 61%

Do you notice the third column that keeps a tab on the percentages of customer retained? This is the basic Idea behind customer retention rate.

How is it used?

This metric correlates with other key business performance measures like: customer service, product quality, customer loyalty. Think about it. If the customer retention rate is higher than the organization must be doing “something” right – that something could be: great loyalty program, great customer service or great product quality! If it’s low then it requires some action from decision makers – they would want to know the reasons so that they could fix the situation.

In earlier post, we talked about Customer Lifetime Value – now higher customer retention rate would also help us have a higher customer lifetime value.

Also it’s important to realize that the cost of acquiring a new customer is typically higher than keeping existing customer – and so organization that sells products/service like to measure the customer retention rate.

Also, if you customer data then you can drill down to find trends in the retention rate. Questions like: Which Age group has the highest retention rate? or which has lower? Retention rate for male customers? And also predicting customer retention rate of a new customer?

Conclusion:

In this post, we learned about a business metric “customer retention rate”.

And as a reminder, This series is meant to understand Business Metrics from Analytics Perspective.