Improve Retention for Meal Delivery

Business Context

FreshPlate is a subscription meal-kit app with 420,000 monthly active customers. Over the last two quarters, 90-day customer retention fell from 41% to 34%, while paid acquisition spend increased 18%, putting pressure on LTV and payback targets.

Metric Scenario

The Head of Growth wants to know what data you would analyze to improve retention, and where you would look first. Recent operating data shows: first-order conversion is stable at 22%, average order frequency declined from 2.8 to 2.4 orders per month, cancellation rate rose from 5.1% to 7.3% monthly, and on-time delivery dropped from 96% to 92%. NPS also fell from 48 to 39, with the largest decline among customers in their first 30 days.

Requirements

1. Define the primary retention metric you would use and explain why it is the right KPI.
2. Identify the key datasets and fields you would analyze to diagnose the retention decline.
3. Break retention down into the most important dimensions and explain what each cut would reveal.
4. Propose 3-5 hypotheses for the decline and the metrics you would use to validate each.
5. Recommend specific actions if the issue is concentrated in early-life customers versus mature customers.

Data Available

• customers: customer_id, signup_date, acquisition_channel, geography, subscription_plan
• orders: order_id, customer_id, order_date, basket_value, items_count, discount_amount
• deliveries: order_id, promised_time, delivered_time, delivery_status, missing_item_flag
• app_events: customer_id, event_time, session_id, page_name, add_to_cart, checkout_start
• subscriptions: customer_id, pause_date, resume_date, cancel_date, cancel_reason
• support_tickets: ticket_id, customer_id, created_at, issue_type, resolution_time, csat_score
• surveys: customer_id, survey_date, nps_score, free_text_reason