Which companies are the most prosperous ones? Those that deliver great customer service! Studies consistently show that businesses that provide poor customer service lose customers and have lower profits. By getting a better understanding of why your customers are defecting, you can identify the primary cause as to why your customers are leaving you. You ask your former customers a set of useful customer churn questions. Are your prices too high? Has there been an unresolved complaint? Or perhaps the competitor offered a better deal? When a customer leaves you, it is called customer churn or customer attrition. Your churn rate tells you how quickly your customers are leaving. You want this number to be low, preferably 0% but this is very rare.

Improve your churn rate

You can improve your churn rate by conducting a survey with a few customer churn questions to find out what made your customers defect. As your customers are already unhappy with your business you need to be smooth when you approach them with your survey. It is a good idea to write a polite e-mail and ask nicely if they are willing to take their time to respond to your survey. Make sure you estimate how long time the survey will take; a shorter time means a better response rate.

A good initial customer churn question would be: “What is the main reason you decided to discontinue your collaboration with us?”

Here you can provide the customer with a few options like:

• We didn’t use your product/service enough
• We decided to work with another provider
• Other (please fill out reason)

Then you move on to a more detailed customer churn question by asking the customer to rate how influential a number of different areas were in their decision to discontinue their collaboration with you. The areas you ask about could be

• range of products/services
• the quality of your product/service
• product development
• customer service or support service
• prices of your product/services

You could also provide a box where the customer can elaborate, but most people won’t do so; they are happy to just give a low rating without providing further details.

You could end your survey by asking if the customer has any other feedback, comments or concern that they would like to share with you. By getting in touch with your former customers you show them that you care for them and if you improve your product or service, they might very well consider coming back to you again.