Research
Five questions we ask customers who leave
A short exit interview tells you more than a cancellation survey. These are the five questions we ask, and why each one is there.
Oona Pettersen, Customer research1 min read
When a team cancels, we ask for fifteen minutes on a call. About one in four says yes. Those calls have taught us more than any survey, mostly because of the questions we stopped asking.
The five questions
- What were you hoping Meridel would do when you signed up? The answer tells us whether we sold the right thing, before we ask whether we built it.
- When did you last open it, and what for? People remember the last time better than the general pattern.
- What do you use instead now? Often the answer is “a spreadsheet”, which is useful to hear.
- What would have had to be true for you to stay? This one is about them, not about our feature list.
- Who else should we talk to? Sometimes the person who cancelled was not the person who used it.
Questions we dropped
We used to ask people to rate us from one to ten. Nobody who is leaving gives you a useful number. We also stopped asking which feature was missing: people name the last thing they looked for, which is rarely the reason they left.
The most common reason teams leave is not a missing feature. It is that nobody owned reading the themes.
That finding changed our onboarding more than anything else. Every new workspace now picks one person who owns the weekly digest.
