Identifying key user onboarding actions improves customer retention

Rocksbox is a membership-based jewelry service revolutionizing the way women discover and buy jewelry.  By complementing your personalized wishlist with the expertise of personal stylists, Rocksbox has reinvented the jewelry shopping experience.

Like any successful subscription service, Rocksbox works hard to combat customer churn by maintaining superior customer relationships.  After initiating regular NPS surveys the past few years, the team at Rocksbox began to wonder… what effect does a user’s NPS score have on churn?  And how can they leverage this to retain their customers longer?  These questions are what initially drove the Rocksbox team to reach out to Mammoth Growth to run a deeper analysis on their customer data and get a better understanding of churn as it relates to their business.

Mammoth Growth specializes in churn mitigation analysis and knew right away that Rocksbox would need to look beyond an NPS score to get to the inner workings of churn.  Together both teams worked through user actions throughout a user’s lifespan and identified 8 factors that may have an impact on customer churn.

Using behavioral data spanning the customer lifecycle Mammoth Growth built survival models using a Cox Proportional Hazards model to show the differences between these 8 identified factors.  Then they applied Kaplan-Meier (KM) curves to plot differences in retention for each of the different factor’s values. 

The findings?  It turns out NPS score was not a strong indicator of churn.  Instead, the analysis indicated that the first 45 days of enrollment showed the highest rate of churn.  Instances where users had completed more key actions during this 45 day period, churned less often.  This insight helped the Rocksbox team zero in on best practices during this initial enrollment period to drive retention.

“We are pleased with how actionable the data science outcomes are and how quickly we can implement solutions” shares Allison Vigil, SVP of Member Experience.  “We’ve been able to quickly improve our customer onboarding process and engage customers earlier to increase retention.”

Post analysis Rocksbox has introduced campaigns to generate early interactions with important features, encouraged customers to engage with products by creating wish lists and favorites and by capturing their ratings and feedback as soon as their first shipment is received.  Each of these user actions has helped to reduce customer churn and instead retain customers beyond this crucial 45 day window.

To help Rocksbox keep a pulse on their customer’s engagement moving forward, Mammoth Growth built a series of Looker dashboards that centralize and report customer data based on key customer events that are proven to drive LTV.  These dashboards give Rocksbox the insight they need to determine which campaign efforts best curb churn and which grow long-term LTV of their best customers.