Learn from Churn: Get Feedback When Customers Leave
A few months back we lost one of our earliest paying customers. This is the story of how that happened and the lesson we learned.
For background, we help you talk to your mobile app users; - you can use Hipmob to improve sales in your mobile app (for talking to a user when they’re about to buy a subscription or complete a purchase) or provide great customer support. For the past year we’ve grown briskly, and frankly we’ve moved too slowly executing on several ideas.
The customer in question was one of our earliest paying customers and was a voracious user - of our webapp and API. Their feedback helped us improve Hipmob, and we often showed them mockups of new features for input. This kind of customer communication is our lifeblood - and it was while reaching out with mockups that we discovered they’d be leaving us for a competitor. I’d noticed their traffic had been down over the past couple of weeks and I mentally said I’d keep an eye on it; it was probably just an ebb. In my mind;
"They’d never leave us without first bringing up the problem and giving us a chance to redeem ourselves."
I was completely, 100% wrong. I sent the customer an email asking for feedback. They responded promptly (as usual) with really generous feedback. In addition, they mentioned:
"… unfortunately we´ll be moving away from Hipmob into something more async …"
Startups are a rollercoaster, and we’ve had our share of ups and downs. That being said, losing this customers was a psychologically crushing blow. We’re not perfect - they won’t be the last to leave us. But to lose one who’d been there from the start, and been so deeply engagedm hit me like a gut punch. I thought we’d been doing all the right things; we talked to customers frequently, iterated the product based on their stated needs, listened, resolved issues quickly, and made ourselves really accessible (all our customers get my cellphone number - many of them call me when they need help). Despite all that, we still managed to not serve the needs of a customer we held really close, and that hurt.
Even worse - they left in search of asynchronous features (such as those we recently released) which we’d been developing, but had been delayed for a few months dude to setbacks and some poor planning on our part. We live on releasing new products and features, and our slowness was now costing us real money. I suspect they were the tip of the iceberg - we were probably not converting far more customers because we lacked these features in the first place, and were only able to bring them to market several months after we first conceived them. The lesson? It’s as important to listen to what your customers don’t say, as to what they do. In our case, it was the difference between a customer who paid, and one who left.
The customer moved on to a competitor, and they’re happy there. I’m happy for them - we work hard to earn your business, but it’s more important to us that you have a good experience no matter where they go, than an average one with us. For those still with us - thank you. Give me whatever feedback you can - I’ll listen to everything you say - and to everything you don’t.
