Know the predictors of retention, not just churn
When it comes to churn prediction, it’s not only important to know when your subscribers might leave but also why they might stay. This information can help service providers leverage users to stay with the content they love the most.
Discover how Evergent and XroadMedia together merge content and subscriber intelligence to find the sweet spot for user retention. In a competitive market, where users are fighting subscription fatigue, being able to personalize their experiences at the right time to increase their loyalty is key.
Watch the videos below or catch up on the conversation with the transcript to learn:
Introduction of Evergent’s and XroadMedia’s partnership
How our combined intelligence supercharges churn prevention for service providers
Churn Prediction and Content Intelligence
The fight against churn is one of the major challenges for the industry. The synergy between XroadMedia’s content intelligence and Evergent’s subscription management creates optimal customer satisfaction and retention at scale.
Industry Trends and Next Steps
Learn which trends are shaping the market today and how they have impacted the next steps in our partnership.
Evergent and XroadMedia
Understand how combining data about the user and the content can be the sweet spot to fight against churn and create personalized, tailored experiences, including upsell offers to increase the value for each of your customers.
What is Content Intelligence? Why is it Important for Churn Prediction?
Churn is one of the biggest challenges that operators and service providers are facing today, with what feels like endless competition and subscription fatigue. With the different types of churn, learn how content intelligence can improve retention campaigns. This approach moves beyond basic subscriber data to understand why users subscribe and consume, allowing for proactive engagement and fostering long-term loyalty by highlighting the content subscribers love. At the end of the day, the content is the main pull to a service to begin with, it should be the reason why they stay.
Industry Trends and Next Steps in Our Partnership
Learn which trends are shaping the market today and how they have impacted the next steps in our partnership.
Learn more about how we supercharge customer loyalty here.
Visit Evergent to discover more.
Transcript of the videos
Introduction of Evergent’s and XroadMedia’s partnership
Tom: Welcome, everybody, to our Partner Spotlight. My name is Tom Dvorak, I’m the Co-founder and the Chief Commercial Officer of XroadMedia and with me today,
I have Sahil from Evergent. Can you maybe quickly introduce yourself, what you do, what your role is? And, also Evergent in a very brief note.
Sahil: Pleased to be here, I’m Sahil Dhar Harkim. I manage partnerships and marketing here at Evergent. Evergent is a monetization platform that combines subscriber management, user management and billing. We help clients across the spectrum, ranging from some of the world’s largest streaming services to companies that are taking sports and going out to consumers, as well as pay TV operators that are really trying to up the ante and kind of modernize their services across the globe.
We work with the clients, including the NBA, DirecTV and SonyLiv in India. We work with the largest streaming service, operated by a broadcaster based out of the Middle East, that has overtaken Netflix in the region.
What Evergent basically does is that we provide a comprehensive subscriber lifecycle platform that helps our clients manage everything across the entire subscriber journey. Right from acquiring the subscribers, engaging them there, as well as enabling them to retain that subscriber, which I think is extremely important in today’s economic climate.
Over the last several years, our platforms really expanded beyond the traditional billing to include capabilities such as AI-powered churn prediction, intelligent offer management, as well as advanced capabilities to really help our clients be able to monetize, the way they want to monetize and to really be able to transform their business models, across every single region.
And really be able to personalize that value that they’re delivering for every single subscriber. This is, I think, also where our partnership with XroadMedia really helps us enhance that ability for our clients to really personalize that experience and improve engagement and drive revenue.
How do XroadMedia and Evergent work together?
Tom: The way, our partnership works from our point of view, is that you are the experts in the subscriber and monetization lifecycle. We’ve built a very powerful knowledge about the user and also of the content they are watching. We call this content intelligence. So that basically we always understand not only what kind of content the user is watching, but also why they are watching it. You might be watching a particular movie for a reason, for example, the plot or maybe an actor or maybe something else, and I might watch exactly the same content, but for a completely different reason.
And I think this is where we work very nicely together in combining what we see, you providing to the operator, the lifecycle management and also the knowledge about the user.
Shail: I think, I really like how you put it right!- Content Intelligence. And I think when you bring content intelligence along with intelligence about the subscriber, I think that’s when things really start to get interesting because at the end of the day, the content or the value that the subscriber gets out of the services, or really keeps them on the platform or what, keeps hooked to the service and if Evergent can bring that intelligence and provide the tools to our clients, to deliver the right offer to the right subscriber at the right time. I think that’s kind of really powerful, in my opinion.
XroadMedia, for example, knows that a particular subscriber is really into, sci-fi and they binge-watch a lot of the sci-fi stuff over the weekend at the same time, Evergent knows that, the same subscriber is on a monthly plan, or on a very basic plan,we know that they’ve been subscribed to or they’ve been renewing their subscription every month for the last six months. We also know that they’re sufficiently engaged and we know that, hey, “this is now the right time to maybe be able to upgrade.”
When you bring all of these pieces together, now, what you’re able to do is offer that subscriber a premium sci-fi bundle. Not only are we able to retain that subscriber, but we’re also able to increase the value that the business gets out of that client.
And I always believe that it’s not purely about upselling. It is about increasing the value, because the money that you make as a service provider is only going to be in proportion to the amount of value you’re delivering to them.
So in a way, I think when we bring content intelligence and subscriber intelligence together, it’s really helping us, help our clients increase or discover what the additional value they can create for their clients and give them a very strong reason to stick with the service and keep them coming back.
Churn Prediction and Content Intelligence
Tom: What kind of problems do we solve for the client? And I think we all agree that churn particularly with subscriber fatigue setting in, with more and more services coming to the market and also pay-TV, you know, service providers struggling from churn, I think this is the number one problem you are solving with your subscriber lifecycle knowledge and where we can help with our content intelligence? Explain a little bit further, how you do this, how you use our content intelligence in your fight against churn?
Sahil: So I think first, for the benefit of the audience, I’d like to break down churn rate, and churn indeed a very big problem. But when we think about churn, we think about it being in two categories; there is what we call voluntary churn, which is a subscriber at their own discretion, choosing to go to their account settings and clicking on the cancel button that is voluntary churn. And then there is the involuntary churn, which is someone’s credit card bounced, may be they ran out of limit on their card. Or maybe they recently updated their card. So let’s talk about both of these. Let’s start with involuntary churn.
For involuntary churn, Evergent already has a lot of capabilities built into our platform. Our payment retry logic and our payment recovery systems. We already have those capabilities. But when you bring in the content intelligence from XroadMedia, I think it just takes things to the next level. Because now, when we send a reminder to a subscriber to update their payment method, we’re not just sending them a service notification. We are able to tailor that notification and remind them why they are subscribed to the service in the first place and remind them that this is the stuff that you love and you’re gonna lose out on this stuff (content), if you do not update your payment method. So, that’s one example of how we can together solve that problem on involuntary churn.
So now let’s talk about voluntary churn. I think it is undisputedly where the content intelligence and subscriber intelligence, from XroadMedia and Evergent, prospectively coming together, really creates an impact. We are able to analyze the user preferences here.
The retention offers that you’re able to put in front of users are far, far more personalized than they would otherwise be if you were solely relying on subscriber intelligence.
As an example, discounted annual plans for sports fans, during the off-season, because that’s when they are most likely to churn. Or maybe like flexible pause options, for the subscription where they can pause their subscriptions, maybe doing it in the month when the schools have just started. And we know that, these are not going to be able to consume content as much. I mean, the opportunities are endless.
Like, I think just that ability to be able to look at your subscribers and be able to put them in these different cohorts based on why they’re on the service in the first place. Beyond just the, I would say the mechanical understanding of premium subscribers and, and non premium subscribers and subscribers that are on an annual plan versus a monthly plan.
I think while that information is great, knowing why they are there on the service, which is an outcome of having an understanding of the content that they’re consuming, that I think is really what is required to be able to engage subscribers. To give them the right offers and create the right value for them and to convert their consumption into long-term loyalty. And I think that’s what you need to do to fight churn.
Tom: And let me touch on one thing you mentioned about these kinds of cohorts. I think there is also something very interesting in our partnership because you know, we can talk about one-on-one personalization or addressing, you know, subscribers one-on-one to fight churn. But we also talk about cohorting. And I think this is where our solutions, in my mind, work very, very nicely together. As well, because you have the cohorts which are relevant from a monetization and from a lifecycle perspective. And again, we have the cohorts. More from an engagement, maybe from a content perspective. And you know, those two bring those together are also very, very powerful. And also helpful for the service provider because, you know, one-on-one communication is not always possible.
It depends on the medium. It depends on the time, the money and the budget they have. So, to have an even more granular kind of segmentation helps them to send the right message to the right cohorts and even create new ones. I think that is super important today, and I think this is also where our solutions work very nicely together.
Sahil: Yup, 100% agree.
Why partner with XroadMedia? What is Content Intelligence and why is it important?
Shail: I think having that intelligence about the content is paramount above anything else, because if I’m subscribing to a service, there are multiple reasons why I might decide to leave.
I may decide to leave because the app does not work as I’m hoping it to work. I might leave, because I’m having latency issues, on whatever device I’m consuming on. I might leave because, you know, it’s too expensive. So those are all the reasons why I will leave. The singular reason, for which I have most likely decided to go to the service in the first place is for the content. I did not decide to subscribe to, let’s say, Apple TV as an example, just because they have, you know, shiny, slinky UI. I decided to subscribe to Apple TV because they had Severance on it, and I had heard great reviews about the show.
So it really is the content for which people end up going to the service.
And yes, while I think we have been able to create a lot of value for Evergent’s clients already, by helping them tailor discounts based on the intelligence that we provide them about the behavior of the subscriber when it pertains to their, everything from how they’re interacting with the system to their billing history and payment history, and their journey as a subscriber. I think the next frontier really is for us to be able to combine that with the content intelligence. Because I think that is the primary reason why someone goes to a streaming service in the first place, is for the content. So the more we can leverage the primary reason why someone is going to the service and the more we can keep reminding them that, this is what you really love about this service, this is why you should consider, continuing with this service, I think that will be far more effective, beyond the stuff that we are already doing. So I think we’ve already been able to unlock a lot of value for our clients. And I think this would be the next big transformational unlock that we can do for our clients in terms of helping them address churn and being able to get that long-term loyalty.
For your first question, which is why we chose to work with XroadMedia, because I think you have been able to demonstrate that, ability to understand subscriber behavior beyond just, very tactical reporting of, like events, QoE and QoS, service providers and will tell you if someone’s having, service issues or experience issues. And yes, is that important? Yes, that is important. That is a predictor of churn. But beyond just knowing predictors of churn, we want to know predictors of retention. I think that is how I would think about it. And knowing what content a subscriber is interested in gives us those predictors of retention. Those are the kinds of things that significantly improve a retention campaign or a win-back campaign. That is the combined power of content intelligence and subscriber intelligence coming together and converting this entire thing from reactive that a subscriber has unsubscribed. Now, what do I do? Converting it from a reactive conversation to a proactive conversation; how do we make sure that we keep this top of mind so, that they do not think about leaving in the first place?
Industry Trends and Next Steps
Sahil: The biggest trend impacting the space is the very fact that interest rates are no longer zero. And the fact that Wall Street is no longer rewarding the “grow at all costs” mindset, which has been prevalent for the last couple of decades or so.
And all that brings into focus for everyone and anyone that is in the media business, in the communications business and is trying to make money out of the direct-to-consumer business is not just the ability to attract subscribers, but to be able to retain them. And that just makes churn management and retention that much more important.
And I think over the period, the other thing that ended up impacting is that if you look at any large streaming service today, they struggle with a fair bit of sprawl across the IT landscape. I mean, they have like a different system for billing and then something else for payments, and something else for running the marketing campaigns, or the engagement platform, and then something else for generating the recommendations. And then there is another layer that’s doing the analytics.
And while yes, I think at one point in time, there was a lot of appetite for it, everyone wanting to experiment with, “hey, you know what, I just want best of breed.” And I gave a lot of autonomy to every single decision maker, or every single functional owner within the organization, to make their own IT decisions. That ended up resulting in this huge IT sprawl that is difficult to manage. You have way too many vendors, and the data is just all over the place.
And I think how that one of the ways to solve it, or at least step in the direction of solving it, is kind of service providers or technology providers, like Evergent, like XroadMedia, coming together and putting together solutions that address much bigger industry trendssuch as churn, so that we’re able to go to the industry and tell them that, “you’re not solving for technology, you’re solving for an actual business problem”. That business problem is this big red number on your balance sheet that your investors and shareholders are asking you about. And one of the ways to solve that is by addressing churn. And this is how you can go and solve it.
The industry is now looking forward to answers that solve very specific problems or larger issues that they’re facing. And it’s not necessarily looking for just the next shiny object. I think that’s the more actionable part. What I like about our partnership is that it’s not just talking about, both coming together, but we have a very actionable plan on how our solutions coming together address a very specific business problem.
Tom: And I have to say, it’s also refreshing that when you ask these kinds of questions, the first answer is not AI. That is actually very, very refreshing for a change. AI is there, and I don’t think we need to kind of blow it up out of proportion. So I think that is very interesting.
What are the next steps in our partnership?
Sahil: So the first is we need to make sure that the market is aware that this type of solution exists, because right now, when the business decision makers or any technology decision makers are thinking about solving these problems, they are thinking about two separate problems. They are thinking, I need a system that helps me launch promotions, that helps me manage billing, that helps manage my users as one problem. And then they’re thinking, okay, I need something that helps me do personalization. But they’re not thinking about the value that they can unlock when both of these technologies come together. So I think driving that awareness is going to be a big area of focus.
On our end, we are doing a lot of work in terms of helping our clients. And this is a constant demand from our clients, the constant exploration of ways in which we can address churn, especially in more complex scenarios. You have single households, multigenerational households, different types of users, different types of content preferences across the season, and our cross-platform viewing behaviors. There is a lot of complexity there. So we will continue doing work with each other’s organizations on developing some of those specific use cases. It’s continuing the work on building the combined power of the content intelligence and the monetization intelligence of the subscriber intelligence and continuing to build those capabilities, extending even to make pricing models more dynamic, that adjust based on what is the inherent value of, or what is the inherent cost of the content to the service provider.
If service providers know, ”I need to only make this much money if I sold all of this content to a subscriber, can that be made more dynamic?” I think all of these are things that can be explored, and that can go very quickly from parts that are being discussed on a podcast into a production environment. As long as we do the first thing, which is, you know, bring the fact in front of more decision makers, these are not two separate problems. We’re not trying to do personalization recommendations as a standalone thing, and you’re not trying to do retention as a standalone thing. The real magic happens when content intelligence and subscriber intelligence come together, and that is what Evergent and XroadMedia can do for you.
Tom: Just to round it off, I think there are two takeaways for me now in our partnership. Number one, as you mentioned, complexity, to take complexity away for the service provider, because you mentioned a lot of parts of complexity there. But I think another complexity that is coming into the industry more and more now is also different business models. So, you know, before, a service provider was either a pay TV service provider or a streaming service provider. But now, they have TVOD, AVOD, SVOD services and so on. So I think that is very important. And to be able to address the users, not only based on what they’re watching, but also where they are in the lifecycle and what kind of business models serve them, I think, can be very complex. And I think this is something which we can address very, very nicely.
And the second thing is, I think it’s also reminding the customer, and they are aware of it in every single conversation, that it’s always cheaper for them to retain customers rather than acquiring them. And so, you know, it is very, very important for them to keep the users as long as they can.
Brilliant, Sahil. Thank you very much for your time. And for this little interview, I would really encourage everybody to check out what Evergent does. So thank you very much, Sahil. And it’s a pleasure talking to you today.
Sahil: Thank you, Tom. Thanks for having me.
