Reference table
Five ways a B2B account leaves, and what a churn curve assumes
Why treating non-cancellation exits as censored inflates your cancellation rate
A table of the five ways a B2B account can leave your book, set against what a standard Kaplan-Meier retention curve assumes about each. Only voluntary cancellation is the event being estimated. Downgrades, acquisitions, lapsed renewals and payment failures are competing risks that the curve wrongly treats as still at risk. Use it to audit a churn dashboard before trusting its cancellation rate. Koji can interview every exiting account to record which exit it actually was.
Where this appears
What's in this reference table
| Exit type | What the account did | What the curve assumes | Why that is wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voluntary cancellation | Actively cancelled the contract | It cancelled, which is correct | This is the event you are estimating |
| Downgrade to free | Stopped paying, kept using | Still at risk of cancelling | Revenue already gone, and the risk profile is now completely different |
| Acquisition or merger | Absorbed into a parent contract | Still at risk of cancelling | It can never cancel, because the decision maker no longer exists |
| Champion departure lapse | Renewal quietly not actioned | Still at risk of cancelling | The cause is organisational, not product dissatisfaction |
| Payment failure | Card expired, dunning failed | Still at risk of cancelling | Involuntary, and often reversible within days |
Use this image
Free to use in your docs, decks and posts under CC BY 4.0, as long as you credit Koji with a link to this page. To embed it, paste this into your page:
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<a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/churn-competing-risks-five-exit-types"><img src="https://www.koji.so/visuals/churn-competing-risks-five-exit-types/churn-competing-risks-five-exit-types.png" alt="Table of five B2B churn exit types: cancellation, downgrade, acquisition, champion lapse and payment failure, with what a standard retention curve assumes." width="1200" height="873" /></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/churn-competing-risks-five-exit-types">Five ways a B2B account leaves, and what a churn curve assumes</a>, Koji</p>
