Reduce Customer Churn with Lost Deal Surveys
Lost deals and lost customers are never fun, but they happen to every business.
It can be tempting to write those lost customers off and work extra hard to replace them, but that’s not always sustainable – especially if you’re experiencing a high churn rate. Replacing lost customers is expensive: according to Forrester, it costs 5x more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. Retention is one of the best drivers of a company’s revenue.
Even though it can feel painful, conducting lost deal surveys is one of the best ways to analyze why customers are leaving. If you can understand the reasons why clients leave, you can address those problems and reduce churn. By proactively addressing the issues, you’ll build better relationships with your existing customers and decrease reasons they want to leave.
Lost Deal Surveys
Lost deal surveys or lost customer surveys are a fantastic way to collect feedback and learn about pain points so that you can make your product better.
If you know what causes churn, you can fix the churn.
These don’t need anything fancy: you can do them with a Google form (they’re free!), Typeform, or any other tool that lets you collect data. At LunarLab, we like to use questionnaires in Honeybook. It really is as simple as sending something out to people and asking for their feedback. And these surveys are useful no matter how people leave your product – whether they’re unsubscribing, canceling their service, if they never sign the deal, or even if they ghost you. Most people won’t respond to the survey, but some will and you’ll get incredibly valuable feedback out of those responses.
If you’re not sure just how to word your emails, Hubspot has compiled 5 free templates and several example surveys from real brands.
10 Tips & Tricks for Successful Lost Deal Surveys
There are a few things you can do to increase your likelihood of success
- Keep it short! It shouldn’t take more than 3-5 minutes to complete the form. Let people know how long it will take to complete the form so they know what they’re getting into.
- Send them as soon as possible after the customer cancels; the longer you wait, the less likely they are to answer and the more likely they are to forget their experience.
- Let people know that you’ll keep their responses confidential. You can even allow them to submit their answers anonymously.
- Include some open-ended questions so people can share feedback in their own words. You may get answers you hadn’t thought of.
- You may be more successful if you send them from a manager, or someone they don’t work with daily. People don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, so sometimes they will be more likely to respond if it comes from someone a bit removed or someone with a higher authority level.
- Don’t make any questions required. If someone wants to answer other questions but not the required question, they may drop out of the form altogether and you lose out on valuable feedback
- Keep in mind that this is for feedback, it’s not a pitch. Don’t try to win their business back here. Let people know that you won’t contact them again.
- Be gracious! Thank people for their time and let them know that you’re happy they were able to find a solution that worked for them
- You can A/B test surveys by sending one set of questions to one group and another set to another group, and seeing which gets the most feedback.
- Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get responses right away. It’s tough to get people to respond when they have closed their business with you. Keep trying!
Sample Lost Customer Survey Questions
These are a few of my favorite questions to ask on lost deal surveys. Don’t use all of these – pick a few or freestyle your own.
- What was your biggest consideration when making a decision to cancel? [Open-ended text box]
- How was your experience with our team? [1 – 5]
- How responsive were we to your needs? [1 – 5]
- Did our price match the value you received? [1 – 5]
- Did the product meet your expectations after speaking with our sales team? [Open-ended text box]
- What features were the most valuable to you? [Open-ended text box]
- What features were difficult to use? [Open-ended text box]
- What did you like about working with us? [Open-ended text box]
- What’s the one thing you would advise us to change for next time? [Open-ended text box]
- What was the biggest difference between us and other products you considered? [Open-ended text box]
- If you’re comfortable sharing, which [vendor/solution/product/company] did you switch to? [Open-ended text box]
- Is there anything else you’d like to share? [Open-ended text box]
- If we update or add a feature that you felt was inadequate, could we reach back out to talk about these changes? [Open-ended text box]
Ready to conduct more user research on your app? Contact us to get started.
