[eddmc]

Agree with this point, and here's a suggestion about one way of doing this.

You have a set of users who you believe are now using a competitor. Put a survey together specifically for these users. You need to ask them a mixture of questions about your product, and how you compare to your competition. Ask them a mixture of fact-based questions (yes/no, select from this drop down etc) and opinion based questions (both free text, and of the form: very satisfied, satisfied, dissatisfied, very dissatisfied)

Once you've got your survey together, email it to a proportion of these users - maybe 30% of them. In your email, take the approach of... we are beta and are requesting feedback from users on our product and service etc. Keep the email short. Tell them the survey is 10 questions long and should only take 2 minutes to complete (both of these points need to be true!)

Take the view that a 5% response rate is a good response rate (anything over that is a real bonus). Monitor for a few days, maybe a week. See whether the answers to your questions are of any use at all - your questions could come across as lame or open to mis-interpretation. If you are getting problems like that, make some adjustments to your questions. Then email it out to the other 70% of users.

Hopefully you now have some useful information on where you can improve.

What have you got to lose?

[jerf]

That's one way. There's another, even better way: Ask. Ideally, talky-talky over the phone, if you can get it. Direct, personal, simple emails if not.

[astrec]

This is more along the lines of what I was thinking.

I'd normally call, get as close to the decision maker as is possible (not always easy in big companies), tell them you're sorry that you weren't up to snuff, then LISTEN.

It's amazing what comes out of these conversations: Your product might be slow, missing a feature, their general counsel might have had reservations your startup, your account management might suck, the decision maker might play golf with the CEO of the other company etc. etc.

Your guess that your users are choosing our competitors because they have better features and more customization options is correct in only one of these cases. You're doing a startup: You don't have time to fix problems your customers don't have. So ask.