Customers are the lifeblood of almost every business. Regardless of whether you sell ice sculptures or insurance, maintaining your client list should be one of the top priorities on your to-do list. Although many companies are experts in attracting new customers. It’s a fact that retaining existing ones is far cheaper and more effective. This is why, when a customer leaves (as customers will inevitably do from time to time), it’s good practice to find out the reason for their departure. Then you can focus your efforts into making sure it doesn’t happen again.
What should you consider when designing a customer churn questionnaire?
A customer churn questionnaire is a short survey designed to be sent to churned customers. These are the ones who have switched to another supplier or who no longer interact with you. Churning may happen for various reasons, and the purpose of the questionnaire is to find out what those reasons are.
Since we are interested in the reasons for the customer’s departure, it seems like the first question should be “why are you leaving us?”. In fact, this seems like almost the only question of importance. However, while the question itself is important, this particular phrasing may cause problems. Firstly, it is too open, offering little inspiration for an answer. Many people may not have defined their reasons for switching suppliers, even to themselves. Secondly, it requires a lot of typing to answer. Dissatisfied customers are unlikely to make the effort to write a full and detailed response and you may miss out on valuable information.
The magic in the phrasing
An effective questionnaire is one that takes little effort to answer. You can extract far more information by making things easy for the respondents. For example, you could ask which part of your product or service did not meet the customer’s expectations. The answer can be in multiple choice format, in which items such as ordering process/delivery/performance are listed, with the option to select more than one of the options. It is also important to have an “other” box and space for the customer to write their own text.
This style of questioning is far more effective than the open question mentioned above. Of course, not all customers will give helpful answers (for example, simply ticking all the boxes is unhelpful) but many will. If you make your questions quick and easy to answer, you will be rewarded with more useful information.
Get more help with creating an effective questionnaire tailored to your business and industry. Find out how Netigate can help you to reduce your churn rate.
