Client Churn Early Warning

The earliest churn signals are communication changes, not results. A client who stops replying quickly has already started disengaging emotionally — long before they question results or scrutinise budget. By the time those later signals appear, you have 15-30 days and an intervention conversation, not a relationship to rescue. The skill teaches you to read the early window where action actually works.

Twelve evidence-based signals get scored in three tiers. Communication signals appear 60-90 days before churn — response time decay, meeting cancellations, CC additions (new senior people copied for audit mode), brevity shift from detailed feedback to rubber-stamping. Engagement signals appear 30-60 days out — strategy disinterest, approval without review, competitor mentions, reduced scope requests because they're winding down their commitment internally. Relationship signals appear 15-30 days out — champion departure, budget scrutiny, results interrogation, procurement involvement. Each client gets a signal count and a risk level: 0-1 normal, 2-3 monitoring, 4-6 at-risk (14-day plan), 7+ critical (escalate to leadership).

The intervention plans are specific because vague "check in with the client" advice doesn't survive a Monday morning. The 14-day at-risk plan walks day by day: senior leader informal catch-up, unexpected value-add deliverable, strategic session, case-study share, direct "how are we doing" conversation. The critical-risk plan compresses this into the same week, adds a reset proposal based on current needs rather than original scope, and prepares pricing-as-last-resort options. Each action has an owner and a date — the skill rejects "consider reaching out" as not actionable enough.

Champion departure gets called out as a separate emergency. When your internal advocate leaves or moves role, you have about 30 days to build the new relationship before the account becomes vulnerable to a procurement-led review. The skill flags this signal independently of the others because the response is different — relationship rebuild, not retention pitch. And the portfolio view ends with healthy-client expansion notes, because client retention work and client growth work share the same data, and most agencies miss the expansion half by focusing only on the fires.