#CustomerFeedback #CustomerInsights #CancellationFeedback
Hey y’all! 🙋♂️ Let’s talk about something that’s been driving me crazy lately… Why is it so dang hard to get feedback from customers who cancel? 🤯 I mean, I’ve tried everything under the sun – emails, calls, even offering gift cards in exchange for just 15 minutes of their time. And yet, crickets. 🦗
It’s like pulling teeth to get any sort of constructive criticism from them. It’s always the same vague answers like “I don’t need this anymore” or “I need more features.” 🤷♂️ But where’s the detail? How can we improve if we don’t know what went wrong?
On the flip side, it’s a breeze to chat with happy customers who love our product. They’re always so willing to share their thoughts and insights. Why can’t it be that easy with the ones who cancelled? 🙄
So, here’s my rant… any suggestions on how to effectively solicit feedback from these elusive cancellers? 🤔 Share your tips and tricks below so we can all learn together! 🌟 #FeedbackTips #CustomerRetention #CustomerExperience
Why would they put in more time to a company they are not doing business with?
It’s a volume game. A small small proportion will talk to you, you just gotta find them. Might help to have a very personalized outreach with an impressive title to make them feel like someone with power cares.
When I leave a shitty restaurant, I dont want to explain why.
You’re the shitty restaurant
IMO, because of the belief that “nothing will change”
You’re asking them too late. Check in with them BEFORE they tend to cancel. Get the feedback then. Once they’ve decided to quit, they literallly don’t want to waste another second. Because why?
They’ve already checked out, they don’t care.
Damn I don’t even want to take a call for waaaaay more important matters and you expect me to spend 15 mins on the phone with some random service I wanted out?
If you tell me what the product is I’ll tell you the actual value. The value isn’t the features. It’s the effect it has on them, the actual feelings they experience. If you are getting cancelled subscriptions, it is because you’re not repeating the value.
I’m a professional researcher who does this all the time. People are flooded with popup surveys, market-y emails requesting feedback, and the like.
Here are some ways to stand out and get people to respond to you:
-Use your own email
-Frame the request as wanting to learn more about the particular problem space you’re in, and wanting the person’s “advice” or “expertise.” This shifts the focus to them, rather than making it all about “feedback on my product.” Most people will only go out of their way to give feedback if it’s very good or very bad
-offer a generous incentive. I’m talking $25 for 30 mins, $50-$75 for an hour. This is the price of getting a perfect stranger to give you their time.
Happy to chat more. There are plenty of other strategies as well.
It’s an indication that their need isn’t that strong, probably.
Have you created a radio 🔘 selection of different reasons for those who cancel?
How much does a customer pay you? If it’s not much money then the only people who will take time to tell you are exceptionally pissed off ones.
If these are larger customers you should have a customer success function, and usually a good csm will have a decent enough relationship that a customer will give an exit interview.
write a personal brief non form message and sign it as a personal favor requested by the founder and CEO
Ask for consent and consider giving up front rewards. Something along the lines of “we’re sorry to see you go. We value the time you’ve spent on our product and here is a $5 gift card code to show our appreciation: gift card code
We’d love to get some feedback from you if you’re willing.”
There has been research that shows that giving an upfront reward significantly improves the engagement.
I don’t even talk to my close friends every few weeks, why would I give time to someone/something I already cut off ties with.
most users don’t know how to give feedback on a product.
Its uncomfortable to tell people negative feedback. Its one of the reasons I do product marketing consulting, as consistently it is more comfortable to chat with a neutral party that isn’t going to take feedback personally. Also theres not much for them to gain out of the interaction and people are selfish about their time.
– People don’t like to makes other uncomfortable;
– People don’t want to spend time on something they won’t use
– People won’t give their time for free.
From what i am reading from your post, all these cancelation reasons are basically undeclared customers objections. You should try to do a customer satisfaction survey within your active customers. Based on the findings adjust your policies. This might help, good luck!
Relatable post as I currently face this exact problem. I have been through the thought processes you’ve listed above with a small improvement on response rate. Some ideas:
1) The only way I’ve found to make people help you after they no longer care about your business is to make your earlier interactions as human/connecting as possible meaning they feel bad not helping. This is easy in my business as there’s a lot of 1 to 1 communication between me and my users which means I can usually tell when they’re about to drop so I have a window of being able to find out why and even attempt to change this. But I can see this isn’t possible in lots of business scenarios.
2) Add a regular ‘check in’ function to flag when people are starting to lose interest (use the response rate of this box as an indicator of engagement as well as the actual answers given) and get feedback at that point.
3) State up front that you’re on the constant hunt for feedback and make sure they know it won’t be an uncomfortable conversation. Make it out as if you love negative feedback as it’s the only way to get better so they won’t resist giving it to you.
4) In the cancellation process considering adding ‘reasons for cancellation’ as a last resort for some scraps of data.
Hope this triggered some inspiration for you 🙂