About the expert
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Abisola Fagbiye
CX Strategist, Keynote Speaker & Founder
Abisola Fagbiye is a CX strategist, keynote speaker, founder, and trained artist. She has built customer-success teams across global markets, turned around a struggling 15-person function in six weeks, and brings an artist’s eye for layers, patterns, and the work beneath the visible experience.
Her current focus is Quiet Churn: the accounts that do not complain or escalate, but slowly disengage before a commercial risk becomes obvious.
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The learning
Service failure forensics: diagnose customer experience like an investigation, not a generic audit.
The customer who complains is visible. The customer who quietly changes behaviour is much harder to see. They attend less often, ask fewer questions, stop using a feature, lose their internal champion, or become polite in a way that sounds less like loyalty and more like withdrawal.
Abisola Fagbiye calls this Quiet Churn. Her service-failure-forensics lens changes the question from ‘which accounts are red?’ to ‘which relationship has started to lose energy , and what might the customer already be working around?’ That gives a CXO or Customer Success leader a chance to intervene while there is still a relationship to improve.
Service failure forensics: diagnose customer experience like an investigation, not a generic audit.
Define the behaviour that signals a customer is quietly disengaging before cancellation is on the table.
Pair account data with the stories behind it , a dashboard is an entry point, not a diagnosis.
Ask where a customer has had to work around your process, rather than waiting for them to call it a problem.
“Most retention tooling is built to react to noise. Quiet Churn is what happens before there is any.”
Abisola Fagbiye, CX Strategist, Keynote Speaker & Founder
What research adds
The pattern is bigger than one good story.
Research
Gainsight recommends pairing churn with adoption, engagement, health, advocacy, support, and champion signals; feature-level abandonment can precede the formal loss of an account.
Gainsight · The Essential Guide to Customer ChurnResearch
Sprinklr frames early churn detection around correlated movement across engagement, unresolved service friction, sentiment or effort, and commercial timing , then turning that signal into an intervention playbook.
Sprinklr · Customer Churn Analysis: Catching Churn Before It CountsThe Codex reading of Quiet Churn is that early risk is rarely a single score waiting to be discovered. It is a pattern of absence, friction, and changed behaviour that needs human judgement to interpret. The aim is not to turn every quiet account into an emergency; it is to create enough curiosity and context to contact the right customer before the commercial conversation is the only one left.
This makes the watchlist a leadership discipline rather than another dashboard. Pair the account signals with the experience story, agree what would count as a meaningful intervention, and learn from the behaviour that changes afterwards. That is how proactive retention becomes more than a renewal forecast.
Make it actionable
Use The Quiet Churn Watchlist to make the idea real.
Use the Quiet Churn Watchlist with one customer segment, not the whole portfolio. Choose a behaviour that used to happen and has gone quiet, combine it with one service-friction signal, and ask the team to investigate the customer’s reality before proposing an intervention.
The leadership tension
Retention systems are often built to respond to noise: an escalation, a support ticket, a formal complaint, or a renewal risk. Quiet Churn is harder because no single datapoint is decisive. The commercial story may look stable while the human and behavioural story is already changing.
The leadership job is to combine signals without pretending that data alone is a diagnosis. Engagement movement, unresolved friction, sentiment, lifecycle timing, and the story held by the account team need to be read together , then converted into a relevant conversation before the only remaining conversation is a renewal one.
Watchlist
The Quiet Churn Watchlist
Look for absence, workaround, and withdrawal , then investigate the experience behind the account data.
Choose one account behaviour that used to happen and has gone quiet: adoption, attendance, expansion conversations, product questions, or champion participation.
Pair the behaviour with service friction, sentiment/effort, and lifecycle context: what has the customer had to work around, repeat, delay, or give up on?
Agree a proactive next conversation and a named intervention that is about their reality, not simply your renewal timeline.
Your next move
Day 1
Ask your team to name three accounts that look healthy on paper but feel quieter than they should. Do not start with the red list.
Build it in 30 days
Test a simple weekly watchlist with one segment: combine declining engagement, unresolved friction, sentiment drift, and renewal timing, then review which actions changed the account story.
Measure the shift
Track the share of at-risk accounts identified before the formal renewal window, the intervention completed, and the customer behaviour that changed afterwards.
How this creates movement from Director to CXO
You are building more than a good idea.
The move from Director to CXO is not only about spotting the experience issue. It is about creating a repeatable route from evidence to an accountable decision. The Quiet Churn Watchlist gives you a practical way to make that route visible; Track the share of at-risk accounts identified before the formal renewal window, the intervention completed, and the customer behaviour that changed afterwards. Build a retention view that combines behaviour, service failure, and human context before the commercial risk becomes visible.
Additional resources
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Book
Customer Experience: What, How and Why Now
Don Peppers on why customer experience matters, how it works, and where leaders can begin.
Website
Abisola Fagbiye
Abisola’s work on customer experience strategy, speaking, and Quiet Churn.
Research
Gainsight · The Essential Guide to Customer Churn
Gainsight recommends pairing churn with adoption, engagement, health, advocacy, support, and champion signals; feature-level abandonment can precede the formal loss of an account.
Research
Sprinklr · Customer Churn Analysis: Catching Churn Before It Counts
Sprinklr frames early churn detection around correlated movement across engagement, unresolved service friction, sentiment or effort, and commercial timing , then turning that signal into an intervention playbook.
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