The brutal email I’m actually glad I received.
by•
I stopped sending automated churn surveys last month. Instead, I sent a plain-text email from my personal address to a customer who canceled their plan: "No pitch, no discount. Just curious—where did we fail you?"
They replied with a 400-word breakdown of a UI flaw that had been subtle enough for us to miss, but annoying enough for them to leave.
It took us three weeks to fix it. The customer is long gone and won't see the fix, but our retention rate for new signups went up by 12% this month.
Do you actively hunt down brutal feedback from people who left, or do you prefer to focus only on active users?
19 views
Replies
I'd love to send that email, but in a mobile app most of the people who leave never gave me an address I can write to. A cancelled store subscription is a line in a report, not a person. So I hunt the brutal feedback in the data instead, and it turns out people leave very loud traces when nobody asks them anything. My version of your 400 words: of the first 16 users who tapped the buy button on my paywall, 15 cancelled on Apple's own purchase sheet. Nobody wrote to me. The numbers alone said the yearly plan was selected by default and the price on Apple's sheet was the first time they saw the full amount. The fix was one line, preselect the weekly plan, and I'd never have found it by talking to active users, because active users are the ones for whom it worked. So yes, I go after the people who left, just not with a survey. Where I do have an address, I'd copy your email word for word. "Where did we fail you" with no discount attached is the only version people believe.
I'd take that exact workflow to a few people who stayed and watch them use it without hints. They may have found a workaround you can turn into a better default.
That helps separate a common problem from one customer's unusual setup.