How To Collect Feedback From Churned Users?

Churned users represent opportunities.

Collecting and making sense of user feedback is crucial for SaaS companies committed to improving their business based on what their users need.

The challenge is to make ex-users give you these insights. When you overcome this barrier, you'll be armed with the best weapon to improve your product: feedback from real users who paid for your product.

2 types of feedback collection

There are essentially 2 ways you can collect churned user feedback:

Cancellation flow on offboarding
Churned user interviews

The first one is relatively simple to set up (that's what Raaft is all about!).

The second one is a bit more tricky - we'll focus on this method in this article.

Offer rewards for churn interviews

Would you make the time to give extensive feedback after leaving a subscription? Probably not.

Unless... you feel somehow compelled to do it...

When asking for something valuable, give value back.

The simplest way to get churned users to speak to you is simple.

Pay them for their time.

Here's an example script of how you could phrase it:

Hey, John - we’re very sorry to see you go!

We want to say that we appreciate you’ve chosen us in the first place.

We’re working hard to build a great product and we’d love to chat with you one last time about Raaft.

Don’t worry - we won’t try to sell you anything. Our goal is to understand what we could do better going forward, so we can retain other customers like you.

We'd love to offer you a $100 Amazon voucher as a thank you.

You can schedule the call by answering this email or clicking here: (link)

Speak soon!

Conducting feedback interviews

The most critical move to get good feedback lies in what you say when you speak to users.

To succeed in this task, there are 3 best practices you must follow:

Record the meeting

This should be the first question to ask the interviewee. It’s crucial to have this archived data for the Product team but also future reference and consultation.

Build a script in advance

Study what issues you want to address and build a structured list of questions. Recreate the customer’s journey to pose these questions.

Ask about the first contact they had with your product, and go through all touchpoints until cancellation.

If you're not sure how to structure it, here’s our basic churn interview guide:

Sort out the feedback

When you have enough feedback data, try to identify patterns.

Your potential growth lies under common topics mentioned by ex-users. These are the points you have to focus on and invest in in the short or medium term.

Be aware that not all feedback is equally valuable. There are users who leave because they aren’t a good fit for your product. Usually, these people don’t accept being interviewed, but when they do, don’t have a solid reason to have signed in the first place and don’t properly explain why they’re leaving.

Above all, be prepared in advance for getting a firehose of feedback.

Your business can gain relevant information you wouldn't have otherwise. Sometimes little small details uncover a whole new path to success.