6 Top Churn Survey Questions to Ask Churned Customers.
14 mins readAug 16, 2022
People in business are obsessed with user feedback. Good feedback from happy customers can improve the quality, credibility, and usability of the products to generate more value for users and businesses. The customers who offer honest feedback are significant for growth. Therefore, a less-than-exceptional customer churn survey is why you improve the products.
Many businesses take an in-depth approach to analyze their users’ behavior and to know
what questions to ask churned customers. You can reevaluate your product marketing strategy with in-depth knowledge of your users’ psyche. The deeper you know about your users’ concerns, the easier it will be for you to get honest feedback from them.
Even if your website has a low churn rate, you can still dig deeper to know about the changing demands of your users. Having on the same page with your users will help you maintain a steady and the lowest churn rate.
Related Read: How to reduce customer churn
How to have a deeper insight into customers’ preferences?
Many people use intelligent analytics and metrics to determine their users’ preferences. Metrics are intelligent enough to help you with the right information about your users, their true needs, and their real problems. On top of that, this information helped them find the right solutions and prepare the products that meet the users’ preferences well. This information can help you deeply analyze and devise customer retention survey questions.
It is easy to begin if you have a churn analysis survey ready. The knowledge helps you ask your users the right questions. The more you know how to ask the questions correctly, the better you will be able to make an inclusive product marketing strategy.
Many savvy tools help you determine the exact churn rate your websites receive. A few years back, the businesses couldn’t drive much value because the churn rate was calculated manually, and they were never sure whether it was accurate. Intelligent software tools have now made it possible to know the exact churn rate of your website.
Some churn survey examples and questions to ask churned customers
It looks like you have decided to end your subscription with us! Please fill in this quick survey to understand why you are leaving and make the necessary upgrades to our product. Thank you!”
You can enclose your customer churn survey with a few multiple-choice answers. The users can quickly select their answers without wasting much time. The key here is to choose three questions to help you understand why your users are leaving and what they expect from your product.
You can also determine whether they have chosen your competitor over you. But choosing another provider cannot be the sole reason they cancel the membership subscription.
Do you know how you can design your survey or customer retention survey questions?
Let’s begin with some churn survey examples and questions:
Six types of customer retention survey questions
We tried compiling up the most needed customer churn survey for existing and churned customers into 6 categories. Grouping these categories for churned customers is handy for many reasons.
It will help you check up on people who have canceled your subscription while helping you to take measures to prevent your existing customer base from leaving for the same reasons.
For instance, if most of your customers leave due to higher prices, you may realize that you are selling at the wrong price. You will get that you are giving your customers a good reason to switch your products with your competitors for more functionality and lower prices.
This grouping of churn analysis surveys will help you categorize each response. It helps you dig deeper into the reason and map out the problems.
The following table highlights the six categories you can classify your customer churn survey. You can add more questions to your needs and demands.
Questions to Ask Churned Customers
What was the primary reason for canceling your subscription?
Why ask this? This is the very first question you should ask a churned customer to understand the main issue that led them to unsubscribe.
What feature or benefit was missing?
Why ask this? It uncovers the differences between expectations of your customers and what they received. Knowing this can assist you in ensuring that your product meets the expectations of the customer or enhance the way you convey your products to the customers.
Was there a specific moment or experience that made you decide to leave?
Why ask this? Most of the customers do not churn all at once, but they are forced away due to a certain negative experience. That way, you are able to avoid the occurrence of such ‘tipping points’ in the future.
How would you describe your overall experience with our product?
Why ask this? This type of question allows you to capture a general perception of the customer and his or her experience, the good and the bad. It is very useful in identifying trends of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Did you encounter any difficulties using our product/service? If so, what were they?
Why ask this? Churn can also be caused by usability problems. It helps to know which aspects of your product were problematic to the customer so that you can make specific changes.
How does our product compare to the one you’re switching to?
Why ask this? You definitely want to know why your customers are switching to another product. This question will assist in determining where your competitors are excelling in the aspects of features, pricing, and customer service so as to make better strategies.
Were you satisfied with the support and communication you received from us?
Why ask this? Some of the reasons that may cause churn include; poor customer service, lack of communicationamong others. With this, you can gauge whether your support team is efficient enough and if customers are being ignored.
What could we have done differently to retain you as a customer?
Why ask this? Asking what could have been done to stop churn will tell you exactly what action or change could have been made that would have been of benefit. It usually comes up with solutions that your team may not have even thought of.
Is there a feature or service we don’t offer that you wish we did?
Why ask this? The customer can leave if they think your product does not possess some important elements. This question serves to determine the gaps that have not been met in the market and could be a great area to develop new products or expand existing ones.
Would you subscribe to us in the future? Why or why not?
Why ask this? This tells you if you can get the relationship back on track and it also gives you a clue on how to improve your retention or come up with win back campaigns. It also assist you to know if the churn was accidental or as a result of other product problem
Once you have customer churn survey ready, you can now build a strategy to retain canceled customers.
For people in business, it is part of their daily routine to look up reasons to retain older customers. All you have to do is to build a saas customer retention strategy; therefore, you will need to do a little upfront work.
#1. Automate the feedback gathering process.
With the rapid change, every day is a new world. Every day we face new realities. Therefore, every day we have to come up with reasons to collect feedback to know why the customer left and how we can retain them?
This habit should be a part of your customer service script. Put it into automation flow to generate feedback and emails to reach your customers within the set time pattern.
Let’s look deeper into various methods to collect customer churn survey.
1. Contextual Website churn surveys
The questions in the customer churn survey should address serious concerns so the relevant users can answer well. They are placed on the landing pages and mostly appear pop-ups for users to respond to several questions. They work as essential triggers for your users to submit honest feedback. Therefore, it is crucial to keep the customer churn survey question as short as possible, so it shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes of their time.
2. In-Message churn surveys
Business companies send daily messages to their clients, including reminders, follow-ups, invoices, receipts, and updates. They use these messages concluded with CTA or links to feedback surveys.
3. Net promoter score
Its scale ranges from 0 to 10 and asks your customers to rate your products and services. It’s one of the recommended methods to automate the feedback collection process. You can use NPS with newsletters, churn survey emails, business messages, IVR calls, social media posts, and many more.
4. customer churn survey widgets
It’s another great way to automate the feedback method. They can be customized to collect helpful information on the specifics of the products and services.
5. Follow up on the protocols.
Customer Feedback is valuable as it gives you a structure to follow up on and make the necessary adjustments to prevent customers from leaving for the same reason in the future. Your customer churn survey should circle the table and the questions asked above to bring more variations to your questions. The goal is to get feedback from your customers while also giving them a reason to stay.
Moreover, they can help you improve your products or hone your goals and targets.
6. Finding new opportunities
Customer churn survey can reveal some deeper aspects of retaining your customers. They can offer a unique insight into matters that could help you win back lost customers. After seeing the value proposition, you might be able to provide them with free pieces of training, professional services, or discounts to engage them back with your products.
If pricing was the reason for cancellation, you might consider offering them a special discount or even suggest a lower pricing option that suits their needs.
It is easy to win back former customers. Therefore, your effort to retain them would bring you a greater good.
7. Eliminate the roadblocks
Each customer cancellation presents data on why your product is not working for a particular customer. This allows you to revisit your product roadmap and implement strategies to improve the quality of your product, the onboarding process, sales process, and retention process.
Roadblocks are just stepping stones to building a better and more effective product. Don’t get disheartened because no one builds the perfect products. It takes time and effort to get things to work. Work on the roadblocks, implement new processes and features, and monitor the feedback you receive.
It’s a wrap-up:
It is not easy to say goodbye to customers—especially the happy ones.
Being equipped with the right tools can help product managers immediately identify when a customer churns. Therefore, good product management teams will know how to ask questions to churned customers. The right tool will also allow them to create customizable retention flows that can be embedded into the cancellation process.
We must strive to turn negatives into positives by learning from churn analysis survey.
One of the reasons people in business hesitate to ask questions to churned customers is because they are afraid to receive constructive criticism or know the reasons their products are failing. As mentioned, a good customer retention cancellation flow has the right questions. So don’t be afraid to get criticized; ask your customers why they are leaving, why they don’t want to use your product anymore, and even ask them if they have chosen a competitor product because, when it’s all said and done, you would rather have some feedback than no feedback.
The more you know the reasons why people are calling off, the better command you will have in coming up with solutions to retain the churned customers.
Those risks are reasonable that can push you to improve every day. Keep risking, keep improving!
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