Part 1. Building your arsenal

Before you can fight churn with data, you need to prepare the data. Knowledge is going to be your weapon in the fight against churn, but for most products and services, the raw data is useless. Although you will never stop building and honing your data, this part teaches you how to lay the foundations. The goal of this part is to show you how to accomplish a few foundational tasks: measuring churn, creating metrics for your customers, and combining your customer data into datasets for performing further analysis and sharing with your business colleagues.

Chapter 1 contains background information about the industry of online products and services. This chapter also introduces the company case studies and demonstrates the type of results the book will teach you to create. Finally, the first chapter introduces the simulated data case study that will be used in examples throughout the book.

Chapter 2 teaches the calculation of churn rates using SQL. This skill is necessary so you can measure churn properly before starting to fight it. This chapter also lays the foundation for some advanced SQL techniques later in the book.

Chapter 3 is the first chapter on the calculation of customer metrics, which is one of the main themes of the book. As you will see, carefully designed customer metrics are the main weapon you will use in the fight against churn.