Look, you probably know this by now: when a customer churns, that’s it. They're gone for good. I understand you want to capture as much feedback as possible with a churn survey. But here's the catch – chances are, you'll get a bunch of useless responses, and the few that have substance will simply confirm the problems you already know you have.
Not all is bad—you’ll have another data point to beg your Product team to put those damn features and fixes in the roadmap :) Jokes aside, going through all those responses can feel like a waste of time.
So... what’s the alternative? Should you ditch the churn survey completely? Definitely no. They can still provide value, especially if you're running a Customer Success team in an early-stage startup (read: without a lot of resources).
Three steps to collect actionable feedback
Make the churn survey mandatory
Churn surveys may not provide reliable feedback due to biased responses. Only extremely unhappy or very happy customers may take the time to provide feedback, or those with extra time on their hands. Whatever the reason, you get such a small response rate that you can’t trust the trends you see. So my advice is to make it mandatory. Of course, some customers will still give random answers, but this is where open-ended questions come in handy. When analyzing the results, you can filter out irrelevant responses.
For the survey itself, I recommend no more than four questions:
On a scale of 0 to 10, how would you rate your experience with [product name]?
What made you cancel your subscription (multi-choice where just one answer is possible, to focus on the main one)
Follow-up to the second question. Not all answers to the previous question will require a follow-up, but some do:
“missing features” and “experienced product issues” so you can ask for details.
“project ended” so you can ask when they plan to come back. This is especially important in seasonal products, like survey builders as in Typeform’s case (as we’ll see next).
Do you have any other feedback for us? (Open ended question)
It’s important to not add a lot of friction, so only the first two (score + main reason) should be required. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out these resources from Typeform: survey template and best practices.
Address low hanging fruits
We implemented a few actions to address the cases we though we could still save. And in just a few clicks these worked on auto-pilot.
What we did:
When users said pricing was the reason to cancel their subscription, we asked how much would they be willing to pay. We automated this message with Zapier and Gmail. For reasonable asks, we would normally offer a discount on our yearly plans.
When the reason was project ended, it would create a Zendesk ticket. Two possible actions here:
If they had low usage, our team would send resources to inspire them with new use cases
If they had high usage, we would offer a discount on the yearly plan.
Analyze score vs reason
One of the biggest takeaways we had when we launched this was seeing the majority of churned users were happy with the platform. They simply lacked use cases to justify an on-going subscription. This was a gold mine for Customer Success, we knew exactly how to add value. And a few years later, when the product was mature enough, we implemented this use case recommendation in the product itself.
Without adding the score question and making the churn survey mandatory, we couldn't have made this discovery. It makes sense when you see it, but the first instinct is to think “Why would you ask them to rate the experience? They are churning, they can’t be happy!”. As you can see, very wrong assumption.
Conclusion
To sum it up, churn surveys can still be useful if you use them right. By making the survey mandatory, asking the questions you can act on, and addressing low hanging fruits, you can obtain actionable feedback to improve your service and — who knows — even turn some of those users around.
This is part 2 of a 4 part and very hands-on series where I explain how we created our Voice of the Customer Program at Typeform.