Find out why customers cancel — while they are still in the flow

What a cancellation survey is

An exit survey or cancellation survey collects structured feedback at the moment someone tries to cancel. Email surveys sent after the fact get low response rates and miss customers who churn silently.

The best time to ask is inside the cancellation flow — after the customer has clicked cancel but before the subscription ends.

What to ask customers

Start with a small set of reasons that map to actions your team can take: too expensive, missing a feature, not using it enough, switching to a competitor, and so on. Add free-text for detail. Avoid long questionnaires — one reason plus optional follow-up is enough for most SaaS products.

• Your own reason labels, editable per flow without a deploy.
• Free-text follow-up on any reason.
• Required or skippable — your choice per flow.
• Randomised order so the first option does not dominate.

Structured reasons, not just open text

Structured reasons make reporting possible. “Too expensive” picked 40 times is actionable. Forty unique free-text answers are harder to aggregate. ChurnIntel stores both: a reason category for ranking and the verbatim text when customers elaborate.

Connecting feedback to retention actions

Each reason can map to a different offer: a coupon for price objections, a pause for low usage, a plan switch for fit issues, or a route to your team for missing features. The survey answer decides which save attempt the customer sees — instead of showing everyone the same discount.

• Map a Stripe coupon to “too expensive”.
• Map a billing pause to “not using it enough”.
• Map a plan switch to “need a smaller plan”.
• Map contact-team to “missing an integration”.

Analytics beyond response counts

• Rank reasons by lost MRR — a reason picked twice by $2,000/month accounts beats one picked ten times by $20 accounts.
• See offer accept rate per reason.
• Export responses as CSV.
• View the customer journey from reason → offer → outcome in a Sankey chart.

Illustrations on the marketing site use sample values, not live customer data.

Example survey flow

• Customer clicks cancel in your app.
• ChurnIntel asks “Please tell us why” with your reason list.
• Customer selects a reason (and optionally adds detail).
• ChurnIntel shows the offer mapped to that reason.
• Outcome is recorded with the subscription MRR attached.

Stripe-native, embedded in your product

ChurnIntel does not send a separate survey link. The survey runs inside the embedded cancellation widget, triggered by window.ChurnIntel.showCancelFlow(). Reasons and offers are configured in ChurnIntel and applied in Stripe when customers act.