If the intent of the post mortem is to try to run a save play, the CS Director will run ours. These are guided by the conversation, but begin open-ended with "tell me about your decision to cancel..."We recently started having our Operations team running outreach to customers who are closed lost. We found that having someone from Operations yielded a better response which we believe is because customers don't have a fear of being sold. For ICP customers, we aim to get a call. For all others, we send a survey. It's been SO helpful for us to aggregate data as well as contrast the CSM's understanding of the churn drivers vs the customer's. Here are the questions:
1) What were the drivers of your decision not to renew? If multiple reasons, please select all applicable
Budget/price/ROI
Chose another vendor
Chose to solution in house
Customer Success experience
Customer Support experience
COVID impact
Merger or acquisition
Poor implementation experience
Product functionality
Product reliability
Technology changed
Wrong time/not a priority
Other:
1a) Please provide additional context on the driver(s) behind your decision to cancel your BetterCloud subscription. If multiple reasons were chosen, please denote the primary reason for your decision.
3) How are you accomplishing what we previously helped you to solve? 4) What would we have to do differently in the future to re-earn your business?
Our Dir of CS conducts these calls himself, rather than having the CSMs do it, because he'd like to hear directly from the client and not get the info second-hand from the CSM. Fortunately, the volume isn't so high that this is a burden. He asks just a few open-ended questions and typically the client starts talking and provides more good, organic feedback than a more formal set of questions would uncover. He asks:
Why are you leaving?
What could we have done differently that would have retained the partnership?What do you anticipate [new vendor name here] will do better than we did?