The removability test
Seven questions decide whether you own your customer intelligence or only rent access to it. Answer them and you get a score, the gaps named, and the contract terms to check before you sign or renew.
Every answer to this test is recorded, without a name, as the start of an Australian benchmark on customer-intelligence ownership. We will publish the first cut at 100 completed responses and state the sample size every time we quote it. Nothing is quoted before then.
Whether you own your customer intelligence is usually already written down, in an export clause, a derived-data definition and a termination schedule nobody has read since signing. Seven questions get you to the answer without reading any of them, and tell you which terms to check first.
Seven yeses is ownership
Seven yeses is ownership. Anything less is a gap worth naming before you sign or renew. The bands below do not soften that. They say how far from seven you are, and what that distance costs.
- 7 of 7
- Removable. The supplier could leave and the work would keep running. Re-run this at every renewal so it stays true.
- 5 or 6 of 7
- Removable with named gaps. You would survive an exit. You would pay for it, in time or in a transition fee nobody has budgeted.
- 3 or 4 of 7
- Dependent. The supplier leaving is a project, not a transition. Price it now, while the renewal is still in front of you.
- 0 to 2 of 7
- Locked in. You bought access. The renewal conversation is not a negotiation, and both sides know it.
A “not sure” counts as a gap. An unverified yes is not a yes. It is also the cheapest kind of gap to close, because the answer is usually in a contract nobody has read rather than in a system nobody can change.
Answer all seven
Do we hold the customer record?
Yes means: the cleaned, governed customer record sits in an environment your company controls, and someone on your team could query it this afternoon without asking the supplier for anything.
In the contract: a right to export is not the same as holding the record. Read the export clause for the format, the frequency, the fields it quietly excludes, and what happens to the copy the supplier keeps after termination. One CSV, on request, at the end, is not custody.
If the answer is no: on the day the contract ends you will be negotiating for your own customer list, from a weak position, on somebody else's timetable.
Do the signals keep accruing on our side?
Yes means: the behaviour your customer record gives off over time, the intent and lifecycle cues the model reads, lands in your environment as it is produced. Not as a monthly extract, and not only inside the supplier's account.
In the contract: derived and enriched data is the most commonly carved-out category in a customer platform agreement. Ask, in writing and before you sign, which fields count as your data and which the supplier classes as its own derived work. The answer is rarely volunteered.
If the answer is no: you keep the record and lose the learning. The years of behaviour that made the model good leave with the supplier, and the replacement starts from zero.
Can we inspect the model or decision logic?
Yes means: someone on your side has read the scoring, segmentation or propensity logic and could describe it to an auditor with the supplier out of the room. Reading the output is not reading the logic.
In the contract: model logic usually sits under intellectual property and confidentiality, not under data, so an inspection right is something you ask for before signing rather than something you already hold. Law firms flag this clause often. Buyers request it rarely.
If the answer is no: from 10 December 2026 Australian privacy law requires many businesses to disclose, in their privacy policies, the kinds of automated decisions that could significantly affect people. You cannot disclose what you were never allowed to read.
Can we reproduce the workflow?
Yes means: the lifecycle, CRM, sales and service flows that put decisions to work are documented well enough that your team could rebuild them in tools you control, and they run today without a login you do not own.
In the contract: check whether the configuration and the workflow definitions are listed as deliverables you keep, or described as the supplier's methods and materials. Those two phrasings look alike in a statement of work and mean opposite things at the end of it.
If the answer is no: the work stops the day the login stops, and the knowledge of how it ran was never yours to begin with.
Can we explain the decision path?
Yes means: for a named customer, on a named day, somebody in your business can show why the system did what it did, and show the inputs it used. Not the model in general. That decision.
In the contract: an explainability obligation belongs in the terms, with a response time attached, not in the relationship. If your only route to an explanation is a friendly email to an account manager, you do not have one.
If the answer is no: a customer complaint, a regulator's question and the December 2026 disclosure duty can arrive in the same week, and the honest answer is that nobody here knows.
Can another team run it?
Yes means: a different person, or a different supplier, could pick this up from the runbooks and documentation you already hold, with no discovery phase and without the original builder on a call.
In the contract: handover belongs at every phase boundary, not in a closing line item. Look for deliverables at each boundary rather than a documentation pack at the end, because the last line item is the first one cut when the timeline slips.
If the answer is no: you have a single point of failure, and the renewal is not a negotiation. Both sides can see there is no alternative and no time to build one.
Can the supplier leave without the system collapsing?
Yes means: at the end of the notice period, with the supplier gone, the work still runs. Not degraded and not frozen. Running.
In the contract: read termination and transition together. The notice period on each side, the length of the exit assistance obligation, the day rate for that assistance, data return and deletion, and what specifically keeps running during the transition. Most agreements are precise about your obligations at exit and vague about theirs.
If the answer is no: this is not a partnership. It is a dependency you have not priced. That is survivable when it is deliberate and expensive when you find it in the last month of a term.
Your score
Answer the seven questions above and your score appears here.
0 of 7
Removable.Removable with named gaps.Dependent.Locked in.
0 of your answers were “not sure”. Not knowing carries the same exposure as a no, and it is the cheaper one to close: the answer is usually in a contract nobody has read rather than in a system nobody can change.
One of your answers was “not sure”. Not knowing carries the same exposure as a no, and it is the cheaper one to close: the answer is usually in a contract nobody has read rather than in a system nobody can change.
- you do not hold the customer record in an environment you controlyou are not sure you hold the customer record
- the signals are not accruing on your sideyou are not sure the signals are accruing on your side
- you cannot inspect the model or the decision logicyou are not sure you can inspect the model or the decision logic
- you could not reproduce the workflow without the supplieryou are not sure you could reproduce the workflow
- you cannot explain the decision pathyou are not sure you can explain the decision path
- no other team could run ityou are not sure another team could run it
- the supplier leaving would break the systemyou are not sure the supplier could leave without the system collapsing
Put a date in the calendar to run this again at your next renewal, and keep the evidence for each yes somewhere your team can find it. A yes decays quietly.
Name the gaps in writing before the next renewal. Two gaps is a transition cost you can still price. Discovered in the final month, it is a number somebody else sets.
Get the exit clause out and read it this week. Dependent is survivable when it is deliberate. It is expensive when it is discovered.
Start with the customer record. Every other gap is easier to argue for once the record sits on your side of the line.
Your report is ready. The link works for 15 minutes.
What a 4 of 7 looks like
A mid-size Australian retailer, ninety days from a customer data platform renewal.
- Do we hold the customer record? Yes. A nightly export lands in their own warehouse, and the contract names the format and the frequency.
- Do the signals keep accruing on our side? No. Browse and engagement history stops at the platform boundary, and the agreement is silent on derived data.
- Can we inspect the model or decision logic? No. They see propensity scores. The agreement calls the logic confidential.
- Can we reproduce the workflow? Yes. The lifecycle flows are written up in their own runbooks and two of them have already been rebuilt once.
- Can we explain the decision path? Yes. The offer rules are theirs and they are written down.
- Can another team run it? Yes. Two of their own people have run the weekly cycle for a year.
- Can the supplier leave without the system collapsing? Not sure. Nobody in the room has read the termination clause.
Four of seven. Dependent. One answer was “not sure”, and it is the cheapest of the four to close: ninety minutes with the agreement answers it. Two of the three remaining gaps are contract gaps rather than engineering gaps, the derived-data definition and the inspection right. That is the finding. Most of the distance from four to seven is legal work, not a rebuild.
What is stored, and what is not
Your seven answers and the four optional details are stored without your name. Your email is stored only if you ask for the report, and only because you asked for it. No IP address is ever stored. We store the two-letter country Cloudflare attaches to the request, which is what makes the word Australian in the benchmark real. You can retake the test as often as you like.
Answers are scored automatically in your browser, and the same score is recomputed on our side before it is stored. Results are self-reported. Every number we publish from this data will say so, and will carry the sample size. Read the privacy notes.
FOUND A GAP
Bring the gaps to a 30-minute scoping call.
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