Customer Exit Survey Template 🚀

Customer exit survey template FAQ

What is a customer exit survey?

A customer exit survey investigates why customers leave your product.

They’re usually displayed in web apps or mobile apps, right after the customer clicks the cancellation button.

A customer exit survey lets you learn about the weakest aspects of your products and services. Is it insufficient customer service, buggy UX, or maybe your product isn’t what it says on the box? With this knowledge, you can easily fix what’s broken.

Even if your customer exit survey doesn’t convince the leaving users to stay with you, you’ll still get a lot of valuable feedback. The sooner you discover your weaknesses, the sooner you can fix them to retain your existing clients!

Why is a customer exit survey important?

In short, the customer exit survey lets you learn from your mistakes, lower customer churn, and maybe even convince the leaving customer to stay or come back soon.

Let’s go through a few of the most crucial customer exit survey benefits one by one.

Discover which areas of your product need improvement. If you spot patterns in the answers to your customer exit surveys, it’s a clear sign of what you should fix.
Rethink your product-market fit. If many churning customers claim that the product didn’t meet their expectations or they didn’t find exactly what they were looking for, maybe it’s time to change your product strategy—or open up to new audiences?
Discover how you stack up against your competition. If your customers leave you for other products in your niche, fight for your market share!
Reduce churn rate. Chances are, the leaving customers weren’t the only ones bothered by some aspect of your product. If you fix your shortcomings, you might prevent future churn.
Get the churning customers to stay with you. Maybe your customer feels mistreated, and a call from your customer support could smooth things over? Maybe they just need to learn more about the product to find it helpful? Or perhaps they’d come back if only you introduced that one feature? In some cases, it’s worth reaching out to churning customers and trying to win them back. Just don’t be too pushy—stay genuinely helpful, don’t fight for the customer tooth and nail.

For SaaS businesses, running customer exit surveys should be a no-brainer (as long as you stick to survey best practices - more on that below). Here’s why:

You’re able to pinpoint the exact moments your customer is canceling their subscription. This means you can display the customer exit survey at just the right moment, thanks to targeting options available in most survey tools. You’re more likely to collect responses when your customer is still engaged with your product.
Many survey tools, like Survicate, send notifications whenever a respondent leaves an answer to your survey. You can use this feature to monitor negative opinions and respond to unhappy clients in real-time.
You have virtually nothing to lose. The customer was leaving anyway—if you show them a survey, you might at least catch some feedback before they go.

How to make the most out of your customer exit survey?

What makes a good customer exit survey? Let’s go through a few survey best practices to ensure your customer exit survey does its job.

Don’t overwhelm your customers with questions. Leave longer surveys for your loyal customers—the canceling ones might not want to waste time helping a product they no longer use. Stick to a maximum of three questions and make sure they’re as straightforward as possible.
Include at least one open-ended question. They will allow your respondents to speak their minds. They will feel heard, and you’ll be sure their feedback is genuine. If you’re worried that open-ended questions will lower your response rates, you shouldn’t be. Some survey tools, like Survicate, offer partial submissions. So even if your client gets tired and doesn’t finish the survey, their answers to previous questions will still be registered.
Show the survey right after cancellation. It’s best to show an automatic pop-up survey right as the client cancels or even hovers over a cancellation button—while they’re still engaged. Many survey tools, including Survicate, offer targeting options that let you display your survey at the right time and place.
Follow up with unhappy customers. If the situation calls for it, offer compensation or a talk with someone on your team. Stay proactive and helpful—and you might win the customer back, increase the chances for their return, or at the very least build your reputation as a customer-centric company.
Turn feedback into action. If you sit on your precious customer insights instead of using them to improve, you won’t fix the shortcomings that make people churn—nor convince your audience that you take their opinions to heart.

What are the customer exit survey questions?

Let’s cover three of the most crucial questions you can ask in your customer exit survey.

Why do you want to cancel your subscription?

This question (or an alternative, such as “Why are you leaving our site?”) is the core of any customer exit survey. You can approach it in two ways:

As a closed-ended question. Close-ended questions are easier to answer, which might boost your response rates. However, you have to pay close attention to your answer options - make sure they fit your product! Another advantage of close-ended questions is that the responses are easy to analyze and turn into statistics.
As an open-ended question. Many argue that only open-ended questions let you find the real reason behind customer churn. It’s because they let your customers express their opinions and provide more details. However, keep in mind that open-ended questions demand more effort to answer, which might lower your response rates.

How can we improve our product?

This is an opportunity for your customers to share their thoughts on how to make your products and services better. The answers might help you spot some bugs in your app, learn about the shortcomings of your customer support, or even get brand new ideas.

What would make you reconsider signing up?

This optional question will let you identify customers that you can still win over. If they stay on your email list, you can inform them about future changes, updates, and deals. Or maybe all it takes is a message from your customer support and some compensation?

You can find all three questions in the customer exit survey template above. If they fit your needs, just click the “send this survey” button and start collecting responses right away.

How do you run a customer exit survey with Survicate?

Just click the “Send this survey” button above—the process of signing up and setting up your survey will take you just a few minutes.

If you want, you can customize your survey to fit your brand or change up the questions in the code-free editor.

Then, it’s just a matter of setting up the right triggers and implementing the survey in your web app by adding the Survicate tracking code (automatically via Google Tag Manager, Segment, or WordPress plugin, or by copying and pasting). And voila!

Once the responses start flowing, you’ll get automatic real-time reports, actionable data breakdowns, and notifications.

All of that in a free account with no time limit!

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