The founders of billion-dollar companies like Wealthsimple and GoBolt demonstrated an insane level of focus on customer contact. This included calling every free user within 30 seconds and personally answering the 24/7 support line. This unscalable behavior generates deep customer understanding and powerful word-of-mouth.

To combat a high 44% churn rate, the company implemented a simple feedback loop. They surveyed every user who canceled to ask why and what features they wanted. Each month, the team reviewed the feedback and built the most popular requests, steadily improving the product and retention.

Systematically call every customer who has churned, not to win them back, but to thank them and understand why they left. This provides invaluable, unfiltered market research. By the 19th call, you'll have identified core product or service issues that data alone cannot reveal.

When a customer cancels, don't just offer a discount. Create a capture system that presents tailored solutions based on their stated reason—offer a plan downgrade for cost issues, a 15-minute setup call for confusion, or a feature workaround if something is missing. This preserves value while solving the root problem.

Customers approved your price when they purchased. If they later cancel citing cost, it means the product failed to deliver the value they expected for that price. The real problem to solve is the value gap, not the price itself.

The most valuable question a VC can ask a founder is, "Why are customers churning?" According to G2's Godard Abel, investigating what's not working provides the most critical insights for improvement. While founders naturally market successes, the real opportunity for growth and learning comes from understanding and addressing failures.

Analysis shows that approximately 70% of customer churn is not caused by issues with product, service, or pricing. The primary driver is emotional: customers leave because they feel neglected and unimportant. Retention strategies should therefore focus on making clients feel understood and valued, which is often a low-cost, high-impact activity.

Eric Yuan didn't seek an empty market. He entered the "extremely crowded" video conferencing space after discovering that not a single user of existing tools like Skype or WebEx was truly happy. A market saturated with dissatisfied customers signals a massive opportunity for a better product.

Rephrasing your exit survey question from "Why did you cancel?" to "What made you cancel?" prompts customers to reflect on specific product or situational triggers. This simple change can double the rate of usable, actionable responses by avoiding generic excuses.