Market Intelligence Boutique Agency
Know why customers leave,
before they decide to.
Holdfast Intelligence connects customer behaviour, feedback and business data into one clear answer: which customers are at risk, why, and what your team should do this week to keep them.
Client question
“Why are our customers leaving, and what do we do now?”
What we found
The cause is onboarding, not price.
Recommended actions
- Guided onboarding in the first 30 days for new accounts.
- Launch win-back Offer B, the winner in the Synthetic test.
The Holdfast Hub
Ask. Test. Decide.
Pulse, Synthetic and Holdfast AI: three self-service tools, one hub to understand your customers. Watch the 50-second tour.
Industry expertise
Multidisciplinary by design
Senior specialists in research, data science, CX and strategy, brought together around your challenge.
Each engagement is staffed with the mix of expertise it needs, never a standard team. Our experience spans EMEA, Latin America and North America, with delivery in multiple languages.
Our clients
Why boutique
The expertise of a global firm. The attention of a boutique.
Boutique is not our size. It is how we choose to work.
Large consultancies bring scale and broad frameworks, but their deliverables are often standardised and built for the firm, not the client. Holdfast Intelligence is deliberately small: senior experience applied personally to your customers, your data and your growth goals.
Who you work with
A partner sells the project; junior teams deliver it.
Senior partners lead every engagement personally, from first conversation to results.
How the work is shaped
Standard frameworks applied across industries and clients.
Built around your data, your customers and your business model.
Scope
Broad, multi-month transformation programmes.
Focused engagements on retention that start delivering insight early.
Deliverables
Standard report templates and long decks, the same format for every client.
Tailored to your decision-makers: the format, depth and language each audience needs, from board summary to frontline playbook.
How success is measured
The project ends with a report and a presentation.
Progress is tracked against the retention metrics we agree with you at the start.
Relationship
You are one account in a large portfolio.
We work with a small number of companies, so each one gets real attention.
What we do
Six practices, one conviction: decisions grounded in reality.
The problem
Most companies find out a customer is leaving when it is already too late.
Signals arrive too late
Satisfaction scores and alerts flag risk once behaviour has already changed. By then, the decision has usually been made.
Data lives in silos
Sales data, CRM, service interactions and surveys each tell part of the story. Nobody sees the whole customer.
Alerts without answers
Knowing an account is at risk is not enough. Teams need to know why, and which action is most likely to work.
Our approach
Research-grade customer understanding, delivered at the speed of AI.
We combine two decades of customer research methodology with modern AI, so your team gets explanations it can trust and act on, not another dashboard.
One view of every account
We bring together usage, CRM, support and feedback data into a single picture of each customer relationship.
The reasons behind the risk
AI models trained on your history surface early warning signs and, crucially, the drivers behind them.
Clear next steps for your team
Each at-risk customer comes with a recommended action, so your teams know exactly where to focus.
Use cases
Built for the decisions that protect revenue.
From financial services and retail to automotive and SaaS, each use case answers a question your leadership team already asks every quarter.
Customer teams
Early churn warning
Spot customers drifting away before they leave or reduce their spend, with the specific behaviours and feedback that explain the risk.
“Which customers should we save this month?”
Finance & Commercial
Revenue and renewal forecasting
Replace gut-feel estimates with a forecast grounded in behaviour, sentiment and engagement data across your whole customer base.
“How much revenue will we really keep next quarter?”
Account Management
Expansion signals
Identify loyal customers showing the patterns that typically precede upgrades, cross-selling or higher spend.
“Where is our next growth revenue?”
Product & CX
Voice of the customer, at scale
AI reads every survey answer, support ticket and call note, then turns them into themes ranked by their impact on retention.
“What are customers really telling us?”
Onboarding
Onboarding risk
Detect new customers who are not reaching value fast enough, while there is still time to change the outcome.
“Which new customers are stuck?”
Leadership & Board
Retention narrative for boards and investors
Explain customer retention and loyalty with evidence: what drives it, which segments are at risk and what the plan is to improve it.
“What do we tell the board about retention?”
Customer experience services
Turn customer feedback into a growth engine.
We help B2B and B2C companies design, run and get real value from their customer experience programmes, drawing on our team's experience at Qualtrics, Ipsos, GfK and Nielsen.
Voice of the Customer programmes
Design and launch listening programmes across surveys, support, reviews and interviews, with closed-loop follow-up so feedback leads to action.
CX measurement that links to revenue
Build NPS, CSAT and effort frameworks that connect customer sentiment to retention, spend and growth, not just to a dashboard.
Journey mapping and diagnostics
Map the end-to-end customer journey, find the moments that create friction or loyalty, and prioritise what to fix first.
CX platform optimisation
Get more value from the experience management tools you already pay for, from programme design to reporting your leadership actually uses.
What better CX is worth: three illustrative examples
B2C retail or subscription
200,000 customers spending €400 a year on average. Annual customer retention rises from 70% to 72%.
€1.6M
extra revenue kept per year from 4,000 customers who would otherwise have left.
Customer service operation
60,000 contacts a year at €12 each. Repeat contacts drop from 25% to 15% by fixing the issues behind them.
€72K
saved per year in service costs, before counting the loyalty effect of resolving issues first time.
B2B services company
Two firms both report an NPS of 40. In one, detractors are small accounts; in the other, they hold 35% of revenue.
35%
of revenue at risk hidden behind the same score. Same NPS, completely different business.
Hypothetical examples based on simple arithmetic. They are not client results.
Data analytics & big data
From scattered data to decisions you can trust.
We turn large, complex and fragmented data into clear answers, combining econometrics, advanced analytics and AI with deep knowledge of how markets and customers behave.
Data integration and architecture
Bring CRM, transactions, service, web and survey data together into one reliable foundation, on modern platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery.
Advanced analytics and forecasting
Predictive models for demand, churn, pricing and customer value, built with rigorous statistical and econometric methods.
Customer segmentation and value
Identify the segments that drive profit, what they need and how much more they could be worth.
Text and unstructured data
AI that analyses millions of comments, reviews, calls and tickets and turns them into measurable themes.
Market and competitive intelligence
Combine market, panel and third-party data to size opportunities and track your position against competitors.
Dashboards built with your teams
We help you design and build dashboards in Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio or the tool you already use, tailored to each audience from the board to operational teams.
Technologies we work with
Experience management & surveys
Dashboards & BI
CRM & customer data
Digital & product analytics
Social listening & text analytics
Data platforms & cloud
Analytics, AI & statistics
Pricing & choice modelling
We are technology-independent: we work with the platforms you already have, and help you choose new ones only when they add real value.
Beyond NPS and CSAT
NPS tells you how customers feel. These tell you what they will do.
Most companies still steer by a single satisfaction score. We track the indicators that move revenue first, the ones most dashboards are not built to show.
Revenue-weighted experience
Customer sentiment weighted by how much revenue each customer represents, so you see where satisfaction really matters.
What NPS misses: an unhappy €500K account counts the same as an unhappy €5K one.
Sentiment trajectory
The direction of travel in what customers say across tickets, calls and emails, not a single score at one point in time.
What NPS misses: a customer going from enthusiastic to neutral looks fine until it is too late.
Time-to-value
How quickly a new customer reaches the first meaningful outcome they bought your product or service for.
What NPS misses: surveys arrive after onboarding, when slow starts have already shaped the relationship.
Customer effort & repeat contact
How hard customers must work to get things done, measured through repeat contacts, escalations and channel switching.
What NPS misses: effort drives disloyalty more strongly than delight drives loyalty, and rarely shows in a single score.
Relationship breadth
How many people in a client account actively engage with you, and whether your champion is still there.
What NPS misses: when a single champion leaves, a promoter account can turn into a lost renewal overnight.
Adoption depth
How much of what the customer pays for is actually used, and which capabilities are linked to renewal.
What NPS misses: customers can be satisfied while using a fraction of the value, which makes them easy to win over by a competitor.
The business case
Every point of churn is worth more than it looks.
Keeping a customer is almost always cheaper than winning a new one, and retained revenue compounds year after year. Customer retention is also one of the clearest signals boards and investors use to judge the health of a business. Small improvements add up fast.
Estimate your retention value
Simple arithmetic for illustration, not a guarantee of results. Excludes expansion revenue and the compounding effect over multiple years.
Three illustrative scenarios
SaaS scale-up
€10M ARR, 12% annual churn: €1.2M lost every year.
€200K
protected per year by reducing churn 2 points, roughly the cost of two senior hires.
B2B distribution company
€25M from repeat customers, 10% lost each year: €2.5M.
€375K
protected per year by reducing customer loss 1.5 points, before any growth in spend.
Insurance or banking portfolio
€50M in annual premiums or fees, 8% lapse rate: €4M lost every year.
€500K
protected per year by reducing cancellations just 1 point, with a direct effect on profitability.
Hypothetical examples based on simple arithmetic. They are not client results.
Pricing research
Price is your fastest profit lever. Set it with evidence, not instinct.
A small change in price usually moves operating profit more than the same change in volume or costs. Yet many prices are still set by copying competitors or adding a margin to cost. We measure what your customers are really willing to pay, and how they will react when prices move.
Why price matters: one illustrative example
A company with €50M in revenue and a 10% operating margin improves its average realised price by 2%, with no loss of volume.
Hypothetical example based on simple arithmetic. It is not a client result.
+€1M
added to operating profit, a 20% increase, without selling a single extra unit.
Our pricing studies
Price Value Mapping (PVM)
Positioning against competitors
Plots the benefits customers perceive against the price they pay, for you and your competitors. It shows where you are overpriced, where you leave money on the table and where the fair-value line sits in your market.
Price Sensitivity Meter (Van Westendorp)
New products and early-stage pricing
Four simple questions reveal the range of acceptable prices: the point where a product seems too cheap to trust, too expensive to consider, and the optimal price in between.
Price elasticity modelling
Price increases and portfolio pricing
Econometric models on your sales and transaction data measure how demand responds to each price change, by product, channel and segment, including the effect of your prices on competitors' sales and vice versa.
Price Choice Modelling (PCM)
Competitive scenarios and share simulation
Shoppers choose between realistic offers that vary in price, brand and features, just as they would on a shelf or a website. The model simulates market share and revenue for any price scenario before you change a single price.
Conjoint analysis
Product design and willingness to pay
Puts a monetary value on every feature of your offer, so you know what customers will pay for, what they take for granted and what they would happily give up.
Gabor-Granger
Fast revenue-maximising price
Tests purchase intent at successive price points to build a demand curve and identify the price that maximises revenue.
Packaging, tiers and bundles
SaaS, telecoms, banking and insurance
Good-better-best ranges, subscription plans and bundles designed with MaxDiff and choice models, so each tier has a clear role and customers trade up.
Promotion and discount effectiveness
Retail, FMCG and automotive aftermarket
Separates the promotions that create new sales from those that only give margin away to customers who would have bought anyway.
Pricing use cases
Product & Marketing
Launching a new product
Combine price sensitivity, Gabor-Granger and conjoint to set a launch price that customers accept and that protects your margin from day one.
“What should we charge for this?”
Finance & Commercial
Passing on cost increases
Elasticity models and price value mapping show where you can raise prices, by how much, and where an increase would cost you customers.
“Where can we raise prices without losing volume?”
Subscription & SaaS
Designing plans and tiers
Choice models reveal which features belong in each plan and what each tier should cost, so customers upgrade instead of churning.
“Why do customers stay on the cheapest plan?”
Retail & FMCG
Promotions that pay back
Measure the real incremental effect of each promotion and rebuild the calendar around those that grow profit, not just volume.
“Which promotions actually make money?”
Automotive & Aftermarket
Competitive repositioning
Price value maps and choice models show how customers compare you with dealers, independents and online players, and which price moves would win share.
“How do customers see our prices against competitors?”
Banking & Insurance
Pricing fees and premiums
Understand which fees customers tolerate, which ones push them to switch, and how to price new products without cannibalising existing ones.
“Which fees are making customers leave?”
Synthetic data
Simulate the market before you spend a single euro on it.
Synthetic data is generated by AI models trained on millions of real interactions: purchases, survey answers, reviews, conversations and behaviours. The result is a synthetic population that reproduces how real customer segments think, choose and react, so we can test products, services, packaging, prices and messages in a simulated market, without the time and cost of traditional fieldwork.
Lower cost
No recruitment, no incentives, no panel fees. A synthetic study costs a fraction of a traditional one, so you can research decisions that never had a budget before.
Speed
Answers in days, sometimes hours, instead of the weeks a traditional fieldwork cycle takes. Research finally moves at the speed of your decisions.
Effectiveness
Test hundreds of options instead of a handful, reach segments that are hard or expensive to survey, and run what-if scenarios no real panel could answer. Every model is calibrated and validated against real-world data before you rely on it.
Time to answer
Weeks of recruitment and fieldwork.
Days, sometimes hours.
Cost
Recruitment, incentives and panel fees for every wave.
A fraction of the cost, reusable for new questions.
Options tested
A handful of concepts per study.
Hundreds of variants and combinations.
Hard-to-reach segments
Slow, expensive or simply impossible.
Simulated on demand from calibrated models.
What-if scenarios
Limited to what respondents are asked.
Unlimited simulations of prices, competitors and markets.
Privacy
Personal data from real respondents.
No real individual is exposed. Privacy by design.
What we can simulate
If it can be offered to a customer, we can simulate it.
Products and concepts
Screen new ideas, features and line extensions before investing in development.
Services and customer journeys
Test new service models, processes and experiences before rolling them out.
Packaging and design
Compare pack designs, formats, claims and shelf impact across segments.
Bundles, packages and plans
Find the combination of features, services and price each segment prefers.
Prices and promotions
Simulate demand and market share under any price or promotion scenario.
Messages and campaigns
Pre-test claims, advertising and communication before they go live.
How we make it reliable
Synthetic data is only as good as the real data and the expertise behind it.
= the speed of AI, with the rigour of real research.
Public affairs & opinion research
When polls miss reality, decisions suffer. We measure what people will actually do.
In recent years, many high-profile polls have landed far from the final result at the ballot box. Falling response rates, volatile electorates and voters who keep their views to themselves make traditional surveys alone less reliable. Our public affairs practice is built to close that gap.
Political and electoral research
Voting intention, candidate and issue tracking, message testing and campaign diagnostics for parties, candidates and political advisers.
Public opinion studies
What citizens really think about policies, institutions, brands and social issues, and how that opinion is shifting over time.
NGOs and foundations
Perception, reputation and impact studies that help organisations prove their value to donors, partners and the communities they serve.
Mixed-method approach
No single method sees the whole picture. Combined, they get much closer.
= more precise readings, closer to what happens on election day.
Independent by principle
We tell you what the data says, not what you want to hear.
Holdfast Intelligence is independent of any party, campaign or interest group. That independence is what makes our results useful: an honest reading of reality is worth far more to a candidate, an institution or an NGO than a comfortable number that turns out to be wrong.
Why Holdfast Intelligence
Prediction tools tell you who. We focus on why, and what to do next.
Research methodology at the core
Our foundations come from more than two decades of customer and market research at Qualtrics, Ipsos, GfK and Nielsen. AI does the heavy lifting; proven methodology keeps the answers reliable.
Explanations, not just scores
A risk score without a reason is hard to act on. Every insight comes with the drivers behind it, in plain language your team and your board can understand.
Works with the tools you have
No rip-and-replace. We build on your existing CRM, product analytics, support and survey data, so your team keeps its current workflows.
European and privacy-first
Based in Paris and designed for European companies, with GDPR and data protection built in from the first day rather than added later.
Built around measurable outcomes
We agree on the retention metrics that matter to you at the start, and measure our work against them. If it doesn't move the numbers, it isn't working.
Specialists, not generalists
We do not sell broad transformation programmes. We focus on one thing: helping companies understand, keep and grow their customers.
AI with human judgement
AI is our engine. Human judgement is our edge.
AI is a fundamental pillar of everything we do. But we firmly believe it is a tool, not the answer. The decisive insight still comes from experienced people who know which question to ask and what the numbers really mean.
What AI brings
- Speed and scale across millions of data points
- Patterns no team could spot alone
- Continuous monitoring, not one-off snapshots
What our people bring
- Context and cultural understanding
- Judgement on what really matters to your business
- The feeling that turns data into a decision
Technology makes us faster. People make us right.
Founder
Jacques de Raucourt
Founder & Managing Partner · AI-driven Market Intelligence
“The future is arriving faster than we think. The companies that get ahead of it today are the ones that will lead tomorrow.”
Holdfast Intelligence was founded by Jacques de Raucourt, an executive with more than 22 years turning customer data into business decisions for global companies.
He led commercial strategy and growth for EMEA at Qualtrics, and spent over a decade in regional strategy and market intelligence leadership at Ipsos and GfK, working with clients across three continents. Most recently he led product and service innovation at an international research firm in Paris.
Holdfast brings that experience to the question every leadership team asks: which customers are we about to lose, and what can we do about it?
Early partners
Help shape how companies keep their customers.
We are working with a small group of customer, CX and commercial leaders across industries. If retention is on your agenda, let's talk for 25 minutes about how you handle it today.
Book a 25-minute conversationHoldfast Partners
Join our team.
Holdfast is a disruptive company changing how businesses understand their customers: senior research expertise, AI and synthetic data in one hub. We are growing fast and looking for people who want to build it with us, starting with partners who bring Pulse, Synthetic and Holdfast AI to the businesses they know.