What is Churn Buster's Recovery Rate?

This chart shows the normal distribution of recovery rate for companies using Churn Buster. 

‍The average recovery rate is 50.3%.

The highest is 94.5%.

Of course, everyone wants to occupy the high end of this curve. But very successful businesses sit at the low-end, using a similar process to companies at the high end of the curve. How can that be?

Churn Buster plays a role in moving companies to the right–often improving recovery rates by over 30% in the first few months.

Even the most powerful dunning tool won’t be the biggest contributing factor to recovery rate. 

So what is? Unsurprisingly, customer loyalty is the answer.

An air-tight dunning process will keep passive churn to a bare minimum—near zero, in fact. But at some point a customer will need to take action to keep their subscription active, and their intent to renew becomes the dominant factor.

Here’s what an air-tight process looks like:

1. Fix temporary issues behind the scenes, before emailing to ask for a new payment method.
2. Send emails that match your brand’s style and invite customer replies.
3. Share links that make it easy for customers to update a credit card, avoiding logins when possible.
4. Use SMS as a second line of defense, when emails aren’t getting a response.
5. Escalate to your support team for hands-on help with high-value customers.

Run this process 20, 30, 45 days...as long as your business model can afford.

Try offering an incentive to keep the subscription active. Measure everything, and keep improving!

And if none of this works, hey...churn happens.

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At Churn Buster, we'd love to be able to promise 80% recovery rates. But this number is not ours to own.

Dunning plays a big role in recovery rate, and the ceiling on recovery rate is set by how much subscribers love your product or service.

After a customer enters your dunning process, if retries aren’t successful, the customer will need to take action to renew their service (ie update their credit card). And this is how active churn impacts your passive churn rate.

Low overall churn >> high recovery rate.

High overall churn >> low recovery rate.

If your business naturally has a high churn rate, your recovery rate could be below 50%. And that’s ok! Improving your recovery rate by even 5%+ will have a measurable impact on your growth rate.

Recovery Rate Promises

Since 2013, we've learned these lessons multiple times, working with thousands of eCommerce, SaaS, and Digital Subscription companies. It's why we don't make specific promises about what Churn Buster will do for your recovery rate.

Other dunning providers might take a different approach, making promises about how their software will perform. They might even use commission billing to charge for improvements that can be tough to see.

You can see some common claims broken down below.

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Our Promise

At Churn Buster we will never:

1. Promise you a specific recovery rate
2. Claim another service has a "low" recovery rate
3. Bill you based on poorly-measured improvements to recovery rate