Customer Offboarding: Meaning, Templates, Best Practices
Not all churn is bad—what if the door customers exit through could bring them back? Discover how thoughtful offboarding flows, insights, and strategic touchpoints turn churn into a growth opportunity.
Not all churn is bad.
The door a customer exits through should be just as welcoming as the one they entered.
Even if you don't want for it to be frictionless, governments want you to. [Read: FTC's click to cancel ruling]
The good news is that when you treat every departing customer like they're coming back tomorrow, some of them will return.
Data: Why Do Customers Off-Board?
People leave voluntarily and involuntarily.
Think of voluntary churn as someone going through your off-boarding process.
Involuntary churn happens due to payment errors, where some customers likely want to stay.
If we look at stats, these are the reasons why people cancel:
Budget limitations are the primary reason people leave, followed by infrequent usage.
Retention begins where most stop trying—at the offboarding flow. Let's look at some solutions.
1. Deploy An Exit Survey To Offboard Customers
You may want the users to switch to a different plan (a lower tier or a hidden plan). Or, you might want to offer a temporary discount to stay.
You might want to look at their usage data and decide what discount to offer. Or, the plan they're on.
For infrequent usage, you might want to offer a pause option.
Off-Boarding Templates
See how to combine a host of offers like: Offer To Meet, Switch Plans / Hidden Plans, Offer Credits, Instead of Discounts, Term Optimization, Trial Extension, Use Personalized Discounts, Pauses to retain customers.
Khushi Lunkad
Off-Boarding Questionnaire
Take a look at the offboarding questions that other companies ask. This analyzes offboarding questions from the best companies in the world.
Khushi Lunkad
2. Create An Offboarding Experience People Love
Mediocrity is competitive but there's always room at the top.
Calendly is one of the most popular appointment scheduling software. Their cancel flow, built with Churnkey, was organically shared on LinkedIn because how effective yet wonderful it was.
At the same time, Calendly can ensure that their discounts or offers aren't abused.
Churn and retention creates category kings. When you realize that a 5% monthly churn equals 46% loss in customers annually, even a single digit improvement can move mountains.
Khushi Lunkad
Canva is another great example of off-boarding customers at scale. They use what we call custom variables.
Custom variables allow you to pass custom information for each user. Tiny bits of information at the offboarding step can make the difference between a repeat customer vs a churned user.
Customize your offboarding flow for each segment of your audience. Split test and measure ROI effectively to continuously improve save rates.
3. Deeply Understand Why People Churn and Fix It
Growth is iterative. Feedback from customers when they leave is worth its weight in gold. Canva realized that people didn't like how the paid subscription had even more add-ons. This led to a complete revamp of their monetization model.
In a discussion with Dave Burson, Head of Product, Growth & Monetization at Canva, he shared how he drives growth for their paid subscription product, Canva Pro using offboarding flows:
A really great example from this year that we got from our churn feedback was that Canva used to have free content, premium content, and paid content. So, we had two tiers of product but three tiers of content. What that meant was that when you created a Canva Pro, there was still some content that you had to pay for. That was due to some legacy royalty-type model that we initially built Canva into. And we realized that it was a pain in the ass for a lot of people. They create with Canva Pro. They expect the Netflix treatment. And it seemed like a large enough pain point worth solving."
We know the Canva story all too well.
Use Churnkey's Feedback AI and Insights AI to gather and analyze feedback.
4. Say Goodbye To Some Happy and Some Bad-Fit Customers
Happy customers are those whose problem was solved. Where the end goal is achieved and there's no need to continue using the product. Hinge's tagline: Delete Hinge is focused on anti-retention.
Bad fit customers are users who are misaligned with your product, goals, or ideal customer profile. They may have unrealistic expectations, misuse your product, or derive little value from it. You're better off giving them a grand-exit instead of retaining them.
Let's look at another example.
Unity enabled users to create games but struggled to retain hobby developers who joined during the Pokémon craze. Instead of focusing on retention, they empowered these users to recreate childhood games using easy-to-use templates. This approach fueled word-of-mouth growth through a grand exit.
5. Make It Easy To Off-Board
There are many ways companies make offboarding unnecessarily difficult:
- Require In-Person Cancellations
Nothing like forcing customers to show up in person for a digital product. - Hide the Cancel Button
Tuck it away behind multiple confusing menus and unclear labels. - Use Guilt-Trip Prompts
“Are you sure you want to leave us?” paired with unnecessary emotional appeals. - Endless Exit Surveys
Asking far too many questions just to let someone cancel. - Restrict Cancellation Times
Allow cancellations only during inconvenient hours, like 2 AM. 😆 - Threaten Immediate Data Loss
Warn that all their data will be deleted instantly upon canceling.
Try to make the offboarding process as easy as it is to sign up. Otherwise, people might not want to reactivate once they're gone. Or worse yet, leave negative reviews.
6. Segment High-Touch Vs Low-Touch Customers
Not every customer deserves the same off-boarding experience. Some want it to be done swiftly. Some require a more through offboarding simply because you're too deeply integrated in their stack.
Create a segment in your offboarding journey so you can segment these users out.
Conclusion: Offboarding Isn’t the End—It’s an Opportunity
Churn isn’t always bad, and offboarding isn’t just about letting customers leave—it’s about creating a thoughtful experience that leaves the door open for their return. When customers offboard happily, it reflects your brand’s confidence, customer-first approach, and long-term vision.
The key is to turn offboarding into a strategic touchpoint:
- Understand why people leave through exit feedback and actionable insights.
- Offer meaningful solutions like pauses, plan switches, or temporary discounts.
- Ensure frictionless offboarding that respects the customer’s time.
- Tailor high-touch and low-touch experiences to meet unique customer needs.
With Churnkey, you can transform offboarding into a growth opportunity. Churnkey’s customizable cancel flows, exit surveys, and actionable insights help you retain more customers while creating experiences they’ll appreciate. Brands like Calendly have shown how effective offboarding flows can spark word-of-mouth, and with Churnkey, you can replicate that success.
When you treat offboarding as part of the customer journey—not the end of it—you lay the groundwork for reactivation, referrals, and long-term growth.
Churnkey helps you turn offboarding into an opportunity to retain, learn, and win customers.
