Field notes · 3 February 2026
Cancellation notes that finance can use
Support tickets are written for empathy. Finance needs coded reasons tied to dollars. Both can coexist.
Free-text cancellation reasons are rich and unruly. Coding them into a short taxonomy — pricing, product fit, competitor, service friction, life change, unknown — lets finance attach revenue weights.
Train support to pick a primary code before the free text, not after. Retroactive coding of six months of notes is slow and inconsistent.
Once a quarter, sample twenty cancellations and verify the codes against the narrative. Drift shows up fast when a new save offer changes how agents classify intent.
The payoff is a churn cause board ranked by dollars, not ticket counts. That board is what a Churn Root-Cause Review produces in compressed form.