How to Gather and Leverage Customer Feedback to Reduce Churn

When it comes to reducing churn as a SaaS leader, one of the most important indicators to zero in on is customer feedback. If you don’t get feedback from those customers, you’ll never know what you’re doing well, what you need to improve, and why customers who leave are choosing to stop using your SaaS product.

Let’s talk about how you can gather and leverage customer feedback to reduce your churn rates.

How to Gather and Leverage Customer Feedback to Reduce Churn

How to gather customer feedback

There are a few key points in the customer journey where it’s ideal to gather feedback that you can then analyze and leverage. Here are some examples:

During onboarding

When a user first signs up for your product, you have your first great opportunity to deliver value to your customer and position your product for long-term retention. It’s also a key time to gather feedback that allows you to understand what your customer hopes to gain from your product and what their end goals are.

Take a look at this example from Notion 👇

During offboarding

Just because you’re losing a customer doesn’t mean you can’t still gain something in the process. If you’re not gathering feedback during your offboarding process, then you’re losing the chance to positively leverage churn and use it to improve your product. Even very simple exit surveys can give you some insight into why churn is occurring, providing you with data that you can analyze to understand your churn rates.

If you do this with every customer that you lose, you’ll quickly start to see churn patterns and be able to identify where there may be gaps in your product, issues with customer support, or simply incorrect expectations that are being set with customers.

Here’s a great example of a simple exit survey from Click Funnels 👇

Within the app

In-app surveys are also a great way to collect customer feedback. You never want to offer anything too complicated or intrusive within the app that will negatively impact the user experience. But providing a simple one-click survey can be an effective way to stay connected with your users and give them an opportunity to voice their feedback on your product while they’re actually using it.

Check out this example of an in-app survey 👇

With a quarterly email

Staying connected with your customer on semi-regular basis and giving them the chance to provide feedback is another natural, effective way to gather insights from your user base. Try sending an email once every quarter to keep an open line of communication with your customers. Nothing fancy — just express how much you value their opinion and ask whether they have any challenges or questions you could help them with.

Here’s a quality example of an email check-in from the CEO of Groove 👇

How to leverage customer feedback to reduce churn

Simply gathering feedback from your customers isn’t enough. You have to know how to leverage that feedback in order to reduce and prevent churn.

Engage with negative feedback

When you get negative feedback from a customer, it’s vital to engage with that feedback and use it! On an individual basis, always do what you can to help each customer who offers negative feedback. Make sure you acknowledge their problems directly and clearly go out of your way to help. You might save the customer but, even if you don’t, the above-and-beyond customer service will leave an impact.

After you address and engage with the feedback, always use that feedback moving forward. The best way to leverage negative customer feedback in order to reduce churn is by using that feedback to the absolute fullest when it’s time to develop or re-develop your SaaS products.

Appreciate positive feedback

Not all customer feedback is going to be negative. But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful when it comes to reducing churn. When you receive postive feedback from a customer, make sure you always go out of your way to respond to the comments and express how much you appreciate them.

Even a simple “thank you” can help strengthen that customer relationship and increase the potential for future sales. The more engagement your customers get from you, the less likely they are to go anywhere else.

Have a system

One of the best things you can do to leverage customer feedback in order to reduce churn is to invest in resources and systems that will help you analyze that feedback. Because even though feedback is so incredibly important, collecting it, reviewing it, categorizing it, and acting on it can be a real slog — especially when you’re scaling quickly.

That’s why we’re here. We’ve designed Churnkey to help your teams level up by automating the virtuous cycle of feedback. Our AI collects, analyzes, and sorts every bit of qualitative feedback you get, enabling you to get endless product ideas without having to hire a team of data scientists.

Find out more with a demo or start combating churn now with a free trial.