SQL Quest › SQL Interview Questions › Joins
Customer Recency Analysis
Meta's Growth team builds a weekly recency report to identify lapsed users for re-engagement push notifications. For each customer who has placed at least one order, show: name, membership, last_order_date (most recent order), days_since_last_order (integer, relative to 2024-06-01), total_orders, and total_spent (2 dec). Sort by days_since_last_order descending — lapsed users first. Recency analytics is the R in RFM (Recency-Frequency-Monetary), which is table stakes for every Meta Data Scientist (Analytics) interview because it's literally the foundation of growth team thinking.
Solve it in the browser editor →
Runs on SQLite in your browser, graded against the expected result, no signup. A wrong answer gets a diagnosis, not just "incorrect".
Schema
customers
| customer_id | name | signup_date | membership | total_orders | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | John Smith | john.smith@email.com | 2023-01-15 | Gold | 15 |
| 2 | Emma Wilson | emma.wilson@email.com | 2023-03-20 | Silver | 8 |
| 3 | Michael Brown | michael.brown@email.com | 2023-02-10 | Gold | 12 |
orders
| order_id | customer_id | product | category | quantity | price | total | order_date | country | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Laptop Pro | Electronics | 1 | 1299.99 | 1299.99 | 2024-01-15 | USA | completed |
| 2 | 2 | Wireless Mouse | Electronics | 2 | 49.99 | 99.98 | 2024-01-16 | Canada | completed |
| 3 | 3 | Office Chair | Furniture | 1 | 349.99 | 349.99 | 2024-01-17 | USA | completed |
Expected output: Customer recency metrics for reactivation targeting
Hint
Concepts
SELECT JOIN GROUP BY Date Functions Aggregation JOIN + Date Functions
Practise the topic: SQL practice questions · JOIN practice · GROUP BY exercises · Date function practice
In these company practice sets
Airbnb · Meta · Revolut · Stripe · Tesla · Uber · Wise
A SQL Quest challenge matched to patterns reported for these companies — not a question any of them has published.
Related questions
Where would this cost you points in an interview?
Ten questions, no signup: a Skillmap across nine SQL skills and the one to fix first.
Take the readiness test