“We kept dropping the price — people left anyway”
The analytics service was sure it was about price. Twenty interviews said otherwise: customers churned before ever seeing the one thing they signed up for.
Company. An analytics service for online stores. €90 a month, around 1,200 active customers, sold through self-serve and demos.
Every month 6% of customers left. On cancellation, most picked “too expensive” — 58%. They cut the price twice and handed out discounts. Churn didn't budge, and revenue slid.
“We're too expensive.” It looked that way because of a survey with canned answers.
The full question set (9)
- 01Take me back to the moment you decided to cancel. What was going on?
- 02What were you actually trying to get done when you signed up?
- 03What were you trying to do in the tool in those last weeks before you left?
- 04When was the last time it genuinely helped you? Tell me about that time.
- 05What was the most annoying or frustrating part of using it?
- 06If it cost half as much, would you have stayed? Why?
- 07What were you comparing it to — on price and on value?
- 08What would've had to happen for you to stay?
- 09What are you using instead now, and why?
The AI doesn't read these off like a list. It moves through the questions and, after every answer, follows up naturally until it gets to the real point. Here's how it actually sounds.
Interview excerpt
Analysis of 20 interviews
sonarum pulls 20 conversations into a single report: which themes come up most, real quotes, and what it all means.
“If I'd seen that report in the first week, I'd have paid twice as much.”
“I'm not against the price. I'm against having to suffer for a week to earn it.”
“I moved to something simpler — it does less, but I got it all in one evening.”
- “Too expensive” in the survey was covering for the real reason — people simply never saw the value. Price was an excuse, not the problem.
- Customers left in the first week, never reaching the report they'd signed up for.
- Cutting the price was pointless — it did nothing to get people closer to the value.
Leave the price alone. Rebuild onboarding: a “your first report in 10 minutes” wizard, plus a day-three email if the person still hasn't opened the key report.
In three months churn nearly halved, and the share of people who reached the value grew by half. Discounts were dropped and the price went back to full. One study paid for a year of sonarum many times over.