Churn survey

Stop guessing why customers are churning. Ask them with this free template. 

Churned customers (customers who have canceled their subscription) can be a gold mine of insight. Finding out why customers left can help reveal how to improve your product, if competitors are stealing your users, and whether your pricing is right. 

Download this free churn survey template and use our pre-built set of questions to learn why your customers are leaving. The churn survey template requires no setup, just create your account, and send out the link to get started.

With this survey, you'll learn:

1. The reasons why users churned

2. Whether their product experience was terrible or fantastic

3. What made them unhappy

4. And how your product could be improved

Make it your own:

• Tweak each question in the template or add your own

• Change the color scheme

• Remove Hotjar branding (with Scale and Business plans)

• Pick between full screen, pop-up or external link Surveys

Gather vital feedback from ex-customers

Even the world’s most successful products suffer from churn. Inevitably, customers will decide to stop purchasing your product. That might be because your competitor has improved. Or it might be down to your pricing. Whatever the reason, you need to know why. 

Ignoring churn will only mean you’re missing out on some of the most valuable feedback customers can give. See, customers who have churned naturally have strong views on your offering. After all, they’ve used the product in the past, and have decided against renewing or coming back. 

This churn survey template can help you start to collect eye-opening information around why customers leave. 

Hundreds of Hotjar customers use churn survey templates like this to learn more about the customer experience. Luke Calton is a Product Lead at Hussle, here’s how he uses Hotjar’s churn surveys.

“We send out these surveys to every single churned user and probably get a few insights every single day.”

With Hotjar’s churn survey template, Luke has been able to figure out why thousands of customers didn’t renew their subscriptions. Luke sends out the survey at the end of the month in a simple email. It took him a few minutes to set up but the insights he gathers are invaluable. 

“I don't like to get emails from Hotjar saying 'Here's another Survey response' because it means someone has canceled! But it's vital information, and I read every single one.”

Each survey response tells its own story and can help Luke identify small bugs, or discover larger UX or PX (product experience) problems. To help make sense of all the survey data, Luke exports responses into a CSV before clustering common reasons into themes.

Initially, this process revealed three key churn reasons; 1) The service was too expensive. 2) The user moved location and no longer needed the service. 3) The user bought a contract with a competitor.

With this churn survey template, you can set up your own version of Luke’s churn survey. What’s more, the template is fully customizable, meaning you can change the question order, add your own questions, and tweak the design.

3 insights you’ll discover

Why your customers churned 

The churn survey template directly asks why customers left. Using multiple choice answers you’ll be able to quantifiably see the reasons why customers left. The churn survey template has a number of pre-built options, including; usage, price, ease-of-use, and competitors. Plus you can add your own reasons if needed. 

Whether customers were happy with their experience

You might expect churned customers to be relatively unhappy. After all they’ve decided to cancel their subscription. But, that’s not always the case. Occasionally customers have to leave even if they’re happy with the product. That might be due to budget constraints, or unforeseen circumstances like the Covid-19 pandemic. 

One of the questions in the churn survey template asks ex-customers what their overall experience was while using the product with a 1-5 rating. Gathering this data will help you quickly learn if customers are leaving because they had a bad experience or if it’s another reason. Plus, if you collect this data over time, you can start to spot longer-term trends month on month or year on year. 

Why customers are unhappy (in their own words) 

In the churn survey template, we’ve added an open-ended question to simply ask what customers weren’t happy with. This can help you learn exactly what needs improving. Using this template at Hotjar, we discovered that some customers had trouble paying. Without this open-ended question, there’s no way we could have discovered this insight.

Set up the churn survey template in seconds

Getting started with the churn survey template is fast and easy. Start by clicking the ‘Get started with this template’ link at the top of the page. 

Once you’ve pressed that you’ll be asked to create an account and verify your email. 

After you’re verified, you’ll be taken straight to the survey template which will be ready for you to send out to customers to start collecting insights. 

However, you’ll also have the option to install the Hotjar tracking code on your site. This tracking code will allow you to host the survey live on your site rather than via an external URL. This might be useful if you want to show the churn survey template to users on a certain page. It’ll also mean you’ll be able to access all four of the Hotjar features.

Don’t worry, installing the tracking code won’t slow your website down. And it doesn’t cost you anything (our free plans are free forever). So, to set up your full Hotjar account and install the tracking code, follow these steps.