Clarity beats cleverness. Choose a precise churn label: non-renewal, downgrade, license contraction, or inactivity beyond a meaningful threshold. Align timing windows with sales cycles and renewal mechanics. When labels match reality, alerts align with business outcomes, conversations feel honest, and experiments measure what actually matters to customers and revenue.
Deduplication, identity resolution, and consistent timestamps transform noisy events into reliable narratives. A straightforward model trained on clean signals outperforms ornate math fed with chaos. Invest in observability, schema contracts, and simple documentation so everyone understands data lineage, trusts results, and confidently acts when a red flag appears.
Markets change, products evolve, and usage patterns shift. Monitor prediction distributions, feature importance, and calibration over time. Schedule periodic re-training, compare cohorts, and run small holdout tests. With drift alerts in place, your churn predictor remains current, useful, and fair, guiding interventions that still reflect today’s customer reality.