2 Questions to Ask in Every Customer Exit Survey
Customer exit surveys are instrumental in understanding why customers cancel. These two questions will ensure you get actionable feedback.
We studied churn surveys from top SaaS products and discovered two essential questions:
What’s great about these questions is they help you understand churn at two levels.
The first question is easy for customers to answer and provides a high-level overview suitable for aggregate analysis.
The second question allows for more personal responses from customers. Not everyone will respond, but the answers you do get can be golden.
Let’s take a look at how to implement these questions in your customer exit survey.
Example customer exit survey questions (and the 2 essential questions we recommend)
First, we want to make it clear that there’s no shortage of questions you could ask when customers leave because subscription companies rely on customer input. Some common subscription cancellation survey questions are:
What caused you to want to cancel?
What product features did you like/enjoy/use most?
What product features didn’t you like, or found hard to use?
Would you consider our product again in the future?
Did our team offer you enough product support?
What feedback would you offer about our pricing plans?
What solution are you planning to use instead?
Phone calls get great results but are time consuming, while email follow-ups see low response rates (~8%).
To maximize feedback with the least effort, integrate your survey into your cancellation flow.
Next, let’s look at each of the two essential questions in more detail, including best practices and what to watch for.
1. "What is your primary reason for leaving?"
As stated above, this question should provide a multiple-choice list of answers to make it painless for customers to answer.
Based on our analysis, the most common options are, in order of frequency:
Best practices: When selecting options, strive for completeness but balance this against overwhelming your customer. Too many options may be frustrating. So, keep it to no more than six questions. (You can always change or refine questions as themes emerge.)
Should you include an "Other" option?
A majority of the surveys we reviewed included an "Other" option, but there are pros and cons to doing so.
The main benefit is that it reduces noise in your data. If none of the other options matches the reason a customer is leaving, whatever choice they pick will reduce the accuracy of your data.
On the flip side, you don't gain meaningful insight from this answer, and some users may opt for "Other" because they didn't want to spend the time to think more deeply about their real reasons for leaving.
TIP: Enable "Other, please specify" in ProsperStack from the flow editor.
Randomization
People may favor the first few options in your "reason for leaving" question.
Consider randomizing the order to reduce the effect of this bias.
TIP: You can enable option randomization in ProsperStack from the flow editor.
Uses
Reason for leaving data has many uses, including:
Correlate reasons for leaving to lost MRR to prioritize improvements.
Launch win-back campaigns segmented by reason for leaving.
Offer incentives to stay based on answers. For example, if the customer says the product is too expensive, offer a discount.
2. "How can we improve?"
This question asks for open-ended feedback, which allows customers to better convey attitude and feelings.
You’ll find those that answer this question offer more insights and motivations than you might have anticipated.
If you see recurring feedback to this question, you may want to add it to your predefined options.
Best practices: Don’t cap the character count. Instead, give people an opportunity to tell you what they think. Then, leverage the insights to improve your product (e.g., remove bugs or add features). And be sure to share this feedback with your marketing and customer success teams.
Free-form responses can be messy, but ProsperStack uses sentiment analysis to highlight popular keywords and to show positive, negative and neutral sentiments in aggregate.
Customer exit surveys are easy with ProsperStack
Gathering straight-from-the-customer cancellation feedback is one of the most effective ways to improve your SaaS product, save customers and grow revenue.
At ProsperStack, we make it easy for subscription-based brands to prosper by automating the entire customer cancellation experience. Get a demo to see our platform in action and learn how ProsperStack customers reduce churn by 10-39%.
