Customer retention survey

You’ve probably heard of the leaky bucket. It’s the idea that it’s easier to stop customers from leaving than it is constantly finding new customers. 

It’s tiring trying to find new ways to acquire customers. A better long-term tactic can be to retain as many customers as possible. In fact, that approach is often cheaper too. 

To help out, we’ve built this customer retention survey template. Send this survey to customers who have stopped purchasing your product or service and get insights to help you keep customers hooked.

With this survey, you'll learn:

• Why customers decided to leave (in their own words) 

• The percentage of customers who’d consider coming back 

• How likely churning customers are to refer you to a friend 

• How satisfied ex-customers were 

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

Increase customer retention with reliable feedback

Life is easier when you make existing customers happy. Support tickets drop, negative feedback decreases, and there’s less pressure to attract new customers. But where to start? 

To increase customer retention, we suggest surveying recent ex-customers about their experience. Learn why they left and how satisfied they were, to try and improve the experience before you lose more customers. 

The probability of selling to an existing customer is around 70% while the chance of selling to brand new customers is as low as 5%. Ultimately, it’s harder to attract new customers than keep (and upsell) existing customers. Customer retention surveys are a great way to identify and address product or service issues that affect customer retention. 

Hubspot sends out a customer retention survey to all customers who have chosen to cancel their service immediately after a customer cancels. This helps them quickly identify any problems while they’re fresh in the customers’ minds. 

Moreover, with Hotjar installed on their site, Hubspot is able to show this survey to downgrading users on the page right after the cancellation. This immediate feedback is far more likely to be reliable and high quality. Here’s Hubspot’s survey:

To replicate what Hubspot discovered, you can use this customer retention survey template. It comes packed with all the questions you need. What’s more, the template is fully customizable, meaning you can change the question order, add your questions, and tweak the design.

3 questions you’ll be able to answer

What are the main reasons why customers leave? 

Hotjar’s survey analysis tools help you group themes of responses into a word cloud. This helps you see at a macro scale the core reasons why people leave. Identifying these core themes will help you prioritize what to work on next. Perhaps customers leave because you’re missing a vital feature, or because your customer service isn’t up to scratch. Whatever it is, you’ll know what to fix with this customer retention survey. 

Will customers consider coming back?

This is an important one. In the survey, there’s a simple yes/no question that asks if customers would consider returning. Determining this will help you learn how big your retention problem is. If the majority of customers would consider returning to your tool, then act quickly and you’ll fix the problem. What’s more, you can target ex-customers who would be open to returning with retargeting campaigns once you’ve fixed their issue. 

Where customers ever satisfied? 

The survey template will help you determine if customers are happy leaving your tool. You might find customers have had a fantastic experience and were satisfied with the tool, but only downgraded due to budget constraints. Or you may learn customers were never happy and wanted out from day one. These insights are vital when determining what to build next.

Set up the customer retention survey in seconds

Getting started with the customer retention survey 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 customer retention survey 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.