Best questions for saas customer survey about churn reasons

Here are some of the best questions for a SaaS customer survey about churn reasons, plus tips on how to create them. You can use Specific to quickly generate a churn survey tailored to your users’ needs—in seconds.

The best open-ended questions for churn reasons

Open-ended questions let SaaS customers tell you what really matters, in their own words. They’re perfect for uncovering insights you would never get from a standard form—especially when you’re trying to understand why someone left. Research consistently shows that conversational surveys with open-ended questions yield richer feedback and higher engagement rates compared to yes/no or checkbox formats. [1]

1. What was the main reason you decided to stop using our product?

2. If you could change one thing about our service, what would it be?

3. Was there a specific moment or feature that made you consider canceling?

4. How well did our product meet your needs or expectations?

5. What alternatives are you considering, and why?

6. Is there anything unclear or frustrating about our pricing or plans?

7. Did you encounter any challenges that we could have helped you solve?

8. How did you feel about our customer support or communication?

9. If you were to recommend improvements for us, what would you suggest?

10. Would you consider returning in the future? If so, what would need to change?

Open-ended questions work best at the start of a churn survey or when you want deep, contextual feedback you can’t capture in a few choices. Learn more about structuring powerful churn surveys with open text in our how-to guide.

The best single-select multiple-choice questions for churn reasons

Single-select multiple choice questions are ideal when you need to quantify churn reasons across your SaaS customer base or make it easy for someone to respond without overthinking. Especially when you want a baseline measure, or to nudge a conversation forward—these questions keep participation high and can break the ice for followup:

Question: What was your main reason for canceling your subscription?

• Product lacked key features

• Too expensive for the value

• Found a better alternative

• Poor customer support

• Other

Question: Which statement best describes your experience with our product?

• Met my needs fully

• Partially met my needs

• Did not meet my needs

• Not sure

Question: How easy was it to understand our pricing and billing?

• Very easy

• Somewhat easy

• Somewhat difficult

• Very difficult

When to followup with “why?” If a respondent selects “Too expensive for the value”, follow up with “Can you share what made you feel the price was too high for the value?” This deepens your understanding—and data consistently shows that customers are willing to provide specifics that help you make actionable improvements.

When and why to add the “Other” choice? Sometimes you can’t anticipate every possible churn reason. The “Other” option lets respondents surface unexpected pain points, enabling followups that reveal truly new insights you’d never get from a fixed list.

Companies with lower average revenue per account often see churn rates above 6% per month, much higher than their enterprise peers, so quantifying the top churn drivers can help prioritize your retention roadmap. [2]

NPS and why it belongs in your churn survey

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) question—“How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?”—is a powerful addition to any SaaS churn survey. It gives a quick measure of sentiment even as users exit, while enabling you to segment detractors, passives, and promoters for deeper followup. Why use it? NPS is a proven predictor of both retention and growth in SaaS, and when paired with churn reasons, it helps map whether your happiest or least satisfied customers are leaving. You can instantly build an NPS churn survey here.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions are the heart of conversational surveying. They transform generic answers into insights you can act on. Our article on automatic AI followup questions shows how much better your data gets when you keep digging, conversationally. With Specific, our AI takes cues from replies to probe deeper, ask clarifying questions, and ensure you get the “why” behind every answer—in real time, just like a skilled interviewer would.

• SaaS customer: “It didn’t meet my needs.”

• AI follow-up: “Could you tell me which needs weren’t addressed, or what features you were looking for?”

How many followups to ask? In practice, 2–3 followups is usually enough to reach useful context—ask too many, and the survey feels long; too few, and you risk shallow insights. Specific lets you fine-tune this: set a maximum, or auto-stop once you’ve collected what you need.

This makes it a conversational survey—an experience that feels natural for respondents and delivers much deeper, more honest feedback for you.

How to analyze open-ended responses is no longer a blocker: AI analytics make it incredibly easy to spot patterns and key themes from unstructured feedback. See our article on how to analyze open text survey responses for step-by-step guidance.

AI followups are a new way of gathering feedback—try generating a survey with Specific and experience how powerful truly conversational data collection can be.

Prompting ChatGPT to write better churn survey questions

Using ChatGPT or any advanced AI, you can quickly brainstorm high-quality churn survey questions for your SaaS customers. Start with a simple prompt:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for SaaS customer survey about churn reasons.

But you’ll get even better results if you add more context about your business, goals, and customer personas. For example:

Our SaaS serves small businesses in the marketing space, and we’ve recently increased our prices. Suggest 10 open-ended questions I could include in a conversational churn survey to understand why customers cancel or downgrade.

Once you have a question list, use another prompt to organize the results:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Review the categories, pick those most relevant to your product or churn hypothesis, and go deeper:

Generate 10 questions for categories “Feature gaps” and “Pricing concerns.”

Iterate until you find questions tailored for actionable insights. If you want a fully streamlined process, Specific’s AI survey generator lets you simply describe your use case and instantly get a robust churn survey—no prompt engineering required.

What is a conversational survey?

Conversational surveys mimic natural dialogue, so the experience feels like a friendly chat—not a cold, static form. The AI asks followups, clarifies or probes as needed, and adapts the conversation based on each response. This way, you collect richer, more actionable feedback from SaaS customers.

Why use AI for SaaS customer surveys? AI-powered surveys unlock the depth of one-on-one interviews, delivered at scale. Instead of stuck forms and abandoned survey links, you get a flow where each reply drives smarter followups. More context, more honesty, more insight. And, with a true AI survey example, you can see the experience in action, capturing data you’d never get from static forms.

Specific leads the pack in conversational survey user experience—from survey creation with natural language, to collecting feedback, to instant AI-driven response analysis. Editing a survey is just chatting with the AI (AI survey editor), making the process smooth and intuitive for anyone. If you want a walk-through, see our tutorial on creating surveys.

See this churn reasons survey example now

See how an AI-powered, conversational churn survey can surface honest feedback and real reasons your SaaS customers leave—while making the whole experience simple, fast, and delightfully insightful. Create your own now and unlock deeper truth behind customer decisions.