Churn survey template
Customers are cancelling and you need to know which cancellations you could have prevented — not a list of complaints.
What this template is for
A cancellation form that only asks "why are you leaving?" produces a pile of reasons you cannot rank or act on. This template forces one primary reason so the reasons can be counted, branches into the specific follow-up that reason needs, and then asks the question that separates preventable churn from natural churn: did they ever get the result they signed up for?
Questions
Every question below is part of the actual survey definition — the same one the preview and “Use this template” use.
What is the main reason you are cancelling?
Single choice + Other · Required
Why this question: Single choice, required, one primary reason. Multi-select feels kinder to the respondent but makes causes uncountable — everyone picks three and nothing ranks.
Watch out: "I never really got started" is deliberately separate from "too hard to use": one is an activation failure, the other a usability failure, and they have different owners.
Which tool did you move to?
Short text · up to 80 characters
Shown when: Switching to another tool
Why this question: The competitor name is the single most useful field in this survey and it is almost never asked. Short text, optional, so it does not block submission.
What did that tool do that made you switch?
Long text · up to 500 characters · Required
Shown when: Switching to another tool
Why this question: Required for switchers. "What did that tool do" gets a concrete capability; "why did you leave" gets a mood. The first can be fixed.
What was missing?
Long text · up to 500 characters · Required
Shown when: Missing capability
Why this question: Required when the reason is a missing capability, because this is the one branch where the free text is the entire finding.
What would have felt like a fair price?
Short text · up to 60 characters
Shown when: Price
Why this question: Asking what would have felt fair turns "too expensive" into a number you can compare against your actual pricing. Optional — many people will not answer, and that is fine.
Did you ever get the result you signed up for?
Single choice · Required
Why this question: This is the question that separates preventable churn from the rest. Customers who never reached the outcome are activation failures; customers who reached it and left anyway are a different problem entirely.
Would you consider coming back if that changed?
Single choice · Required
Why this question: Marks the win-back list. Combined with the primary reason it tells you which fix unlocks which customers.
How many people were using it with you?
Single choice
Why this question: Churn reasons differ sharply by team size — solo users leave over price and effort, larger teams leave over missing capabilities. Without this the aggregate reason ranking is misleading.
Before you go
What is the main reason you are cancelling?
Which tool did you move to?
What did that tool do that made you switch?
What was missing?
What would have felt like a fair price?
Did you ever get the result you signed up for?
Would you consider coming back if that changed?
How many people were using it with you?
When to use this
- At the moment of cancellation, before access ends — response rate collapses once the account is closed.
- You want to rank churn causes by volume rather than react to the loudest one.
- You need to know which lost customers are worth a win-back attempt.
When not to use this
- For customers who quietly stopped using the product without cancelling. They will not open this survey; look at usage data and run a separate outreach instead.
- As a retention offer in disguise. Mixing a discount into the survey biases every answer, and you lose the only honest exit interview you will get.
- When you cannot act on the result for months. This survey creates a queue of specific, dated complaints; collecting them without a plan makes the next one worse.
Branching
The primary reason routes to exactly one follow-up: switchers name the tool and the trigger, missing-capability answers describe what was missing, price answers give a fair-price figure. Nobody sees questions that do not apply, which is what keeps a cancellation survey short enough to finish.
Validation
The primary reason and both context questions are required; the branch-specific free text is required only where the answer is the finding itself. Competitor name and price are capped short — they are labels, not essays.
What to look at once responses arrive
Rank reasons by volume, then by recoverability
The most common reason is not always the most valuable to fix. Cross it with "would you come back" to see which cause is holding recoverable customers.
Split on whether they ever reached the outcome
Churn from customers who never got value is an onboarding problem and usually the cheapest to fix. Churn from customers who did get value is a product or pricing problem.
Count competitor names
One name repeating across months is a positioning problem, not a feature gap. A long tail of different names usually means the category fit is wrong.
Crosstabs worth running
What is the main reason you are cancelling? × Would you consider coming back if that changed?
Separates recoverable churn from permanent churn per cause. A reason with many "Yes" answers is a fix with a queue of customers waiting.
How many people were using it with you? × What is the main reason you are cancelling?
Shows whether your churn story differs by segment. Fixing the solo-user reason rarely helps the team accounts, and vice versa.
Charts worth building
bar — What is the main reason you are cancelling?
Reason ranking. This is the chart that decides what gets fixed next quarter.
stacked-bar — Did you ever get the result you signed up for? × What is the main reason you are cancelling?
How much of each reason is really an activation failure wearing a different label.
Customise it with AI
Paste this into SurveyZero’s assistant to adapt the template to your product. It keeps the parts that make the results comparable and changes the parts that should be specific to you.
Adapt this churn survey for a usage-based API product where the buyer is an engineering lead. Keep one required primary reason and the branch per reason, replace team size with monthly request volume, and add a branch for customers who left because they built the capability in-house.
Related templates
- NPS survey template — You need a recommendation score you can track over time, and you need to know what to do about it — not just the number.
- CSAT survey template — You want to measure one specific interaction — usually a support ticket — right after it happens, and act on the bad ones the same week.