The 5 behavioral signals that predict churn before the cancel button gets clicked

Been thinking a lot about why churn dashboards don’t actually help reduce churn. They tell you who left. They never tell you who’s about to leave.

After digging into the data, there are 5 behavioral signals that show up weeks before cancellation:

1. Login frequency drops gradually (not disappears, just drops)
2. Feature usage collapses to 1–2 core features
3. Your champion/power user goes silent
4. Support ticket tone shifts from curious to frustrated
5. Payment updates slow down (card used to get updated in hours, now takes days)

None of these show up on a standard churn dashboard.

The real gap is that dashboards report snapshots. Churn prediction needs trajectory. Is this customer getting healthier or drifting?

Wrote up the full thinking here.

Curious if others have found different leading indicators that work.