Tips for reducing customer churn
Early on with Quail I struggled with how to retain customers: I'd get a store, then lose them a few months later. Eventually I hit on the idea of sending exit interviews -- basically just an email asking "Hey, what made you cancel / not sign up?" -- and the response was fantastic. Often this feedback was very painful to read ("your product is missing X feature" or "too oversimplified, went back to Quickbooks") but it was consistently helpful in telling what I needed to work on next.
So who else does this? Who else sends exit interviews to churning customers? Has it helped?
It helped me so much that I've taken the tools I used to automate collecting this feedback and packaged them up as a service: if you're on Stripe and want to send fully automatic exit interviews to your departing customers, check out Offramp. It's completely free for businesses with under $1k MRR, and I'm looking for a few early adopters to help me polish it up.
Hey Trevor!
Retaining customers is such a common issue, especially in SaaS. You hit it right on the head, understanding why customers churn is one of the best prevention methods. It can completely shape your product development, road-map, marketing strategies and more.
We recently interviewed the product manager at Postmark and had an amazing conversation about exactly this! Postmark began "switch interviews" where they conducted hundreds of interviews with customers who switched both to Postmark from competitors and from Postmark to their competitors to figure out where their product was winning and where it was falling short. They use this insight to guide their product development, and the results were amazing for them.
We didn't plan on publishing the interview, but it ended up being such a thorough conversation, we threw it up on our podcast. Feel free to give it a listen: https://churnbuster.io/blog/how-postmark-does-switch-interviews-with-rian-van-der-merwe/
Keep up the good work! Growth is defined not only by gaining new customers, but by keeping the ones you worked so hard to get. If you ever want to chat more about this, you know where to find me :)