How to surface issues with an Exit survey

Why are users abandoning their journey early? Why are users leaving in the middle of the checkout flow?

Users can leave your site for many reasons - perhaps they didn’t find what they were looking for, or got frustrated with a broken field in your sign-up form. 

Let’s say you’ve noticed that lots of users are leaving your site while having products in their cart - perhaps they are trying to compare prices between different sites, or have encountered a broken CTA that’s caused them to exit the site. To understand the reason why, let’s set up an exit survey!

Step 1: Create your survey

Begin by creating an exit survey that appears on the cart page. Before creating the survey, it’s best practice to reflect on what your goal with the survey is. For example:

‘I want to understand why users are leaving my site - through this exit survey, I want to gain insight into what caused users to leave without making a purchase, even though they have items in their cart’.

Use your survey goal to formulate the survey questions - ‘what do I need to ask in order to get the information I need?’.

You can provide users both with pre-made answers to choose from, and open ended questions where they can answer in their own words. You can also use the exit survey template, that pre-populates questions for you. 

• Want inspiration for the types of questions you can use? Take a look at this FAQ section.

Need help creating an Exit survey?

Step 2: Create your survey

Now it’s time to analyze the responses you’ve received. Using the AI-powered features you can quickly understand your survey results:

• With Sentiment Analysis, open-text survey answers are automatically analyzed and tagged with ‘positive’, ‘neutral’ or ‘negative’ depending on the response given. Under the Results tab, you’ll find a sentiment breakdown of how users are feeling, and what the sentiment results are over time.
• Automated tags lets you quickly tag responses without reading through each answer. Type the specific tags you want AI to use and let it automatically tag your open-text responses in minutes
  • Let’s say you want to analyze answers talking about error messages, to understand if there’s an error in the cart causing users to leave. By creating an automated tag for ‘Error message’, all answers containing the wording ‘Error message’ will automatically be given that tag. Later, you can use the tag to filter and analyze results.  
• Finally, generate an Automated survey summary to get an AI generated summary of all your responses.

Note down your insights - are users mentioning any particular reasons for why they are leaving your site?

Need an introduction to AI Powered features?

Step 3: Filter replays from your survey respondents

Next, use Session Replay to understand what the survey respondents experienced inside the cart that made them leave without purchasing. This can give you more context into the responses you’ve received in the survey.

For example, if you’ve received feedback with signs of frustration, checking the replay from the session could help you determine what is causing it.

You can access Session Replay directly from your survey responses - simply click the “Go to Session Replay” button or the “Contentsquare icon” next to the ‘view responses’ cta on the response you are interested in.

Step 4: Quantify the impact

Continue by quantifying the impact using Impact Quantification. This can be done either by applying a segment directly in the analysis context, or by using shortcuts in the event stream.

Using a segment

You can create a segment that encompasses users who answered a certain survey result. For example:

Let’s say you asked users in the exit survey to rate their experience in the cart between 1 and 5. You can now create one segment of users who rated their experience 2 or lower, and one segment that rated 4 or above. By comparing the two segments, you get insight into the impact on your KPI of users being satisfied vs dissatisfied with their experience.

You can create a detractor segment directly from the analysis context: 

1. Select ‘Dynamic Variable’.
2. Select your NPS survey in the ‘One page has a dynamic variable with the key’ field.
3. Select the value that you want to analyze - if you want to create a detractor segment, select ‘number’ > 'less than', and the value which is the lowest before answers are categorized as detractors.
4. Click 'Save as new Segment'.

Using the Event Stream

Have you spotted a sign of frustration, perhaps users aren’t able to click on the ‘proceed to checkout’ CTA? Select the event inside the Event Stream, and jump directly into Impact Quantification. Your analysis context will automatically be segmented to reflect the action you selected in the event stream.

Want to know more about using the Event Stream and Impact Quantification?

5. Prioritize and share your insights

By understanding how users exiting the cart is impacting your conversion, you can help decide what priority finding a solution should have. You can use the automated summary option to get a survey summary generated automatically for you.

•  Automated tags will show you how many other customers are experiencing the same issue.
• With Impact Quantification, you’ll see the impact of this negative user experience on your business metrics.

Once you’ve defined your priority, contact the relevant stakeholders - if you have any of the integrations enabled, such as Jira, you can create a ticket directly from the survey response.