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It’s common knowledge that predictive analytics can provide highly accurate predictions that allow for more effective business decisions and product investments. What if predictive technology was so effective that it could tell you when a customer was about to jump ship and leave your business for good? That’s what Zendesk’s new Satisfaction Prediction is setting out to do, giving businesses a leg up in customer retention.

Typically, improving customer retention involves providing support, surveying the customer, offering discounts before churn occurs, and having a courtesy system in place. Satisfaction Prediction can help companies identify key points that serve as a warning flag before a customer drops, such as words or how long it has taken to solve a customer inquiry. Those that have had the most undesirable interaction and are “at-risk” are presented so that companies can take swift action with a positive interaction, thus reducing customer churn.

"Companies used to have a manual process with a dedicated team who looked through those tickets," Adrian McDermott, Zendesk's SVP of Product Development told Business Insider in an interview. "Now they can use our machine learning score and automatically identify those high-risk interactions."

"Being able to get super important tickets from the users clearly stressed or who needs immediate help, and routing them to the right specialist group is a tremendous value to them," McDermott said.

The average business loses around 20 percent of its customers annually simply by failing to attend to customer relationships. In some industries this leakage is as high as 80 percent. The cost, in either case, is staggering, but few businesses truly understand the implications. Satisfaction Prediction helps to mitigate this risk.

A majority of dissatisfied customers won’t complain. They just walk away, and you’ll never know why. It may be because they don’t know how to complain, or can’t be bothered, or don’t believe it’ll make any difference. While they may not tell you what’s wrong, they will certainly tell plenty of others. This is a system for unearthing complaints before they happen, because the customer who walks is lost business.

Without a doubt, it is much more expensive and time-consuming to seek out new customers compared to generating new business with your existing ones. That's why it is so important to that businesses’ practice to nurture existing relationships and retain the loyal customers.

Retention happens through dual perspective; aligning the perceptions of employees with the requirements of customers. Since customer retention has such a direct impact on profitability, having the tools to intercede before a customer leaves is worth its weight in gold.