Pre-existing and they left because of tech/service issues. We interview all outgoing customers.
And I agree our lack of preparedness to scale was part of this, but it's shortsighted to only look at a simple conversation rate for determining success.
"Success" is relative and we define it on a higher level than just conversion. The fact is, software isn't infinitely scalable...or rather it takes orders of magnitude more resources for it to approach that level.
There's a certain inflection point where the time spent "getting prepared" simply outweighs the potential benefits. We could have spent years "getting prepared" but there was a point where we just had to say "ship it"...and that's what we did.
Can you share your experience on getting this feedback during a cancelation? We have mixed success getting users to share. It's about 50/50 for us. We have even lower response rates from users who have finished their trial without conversion.
But ultimately we exchange at least a few emails with every cancellation and try to understand exactly why we were no longer addressing their need. 99% of people are extremely willing to help out here.
So can you cancel without being hassled excessively or not? The founder of the business just stated right up the thread there that there's no self-service cancellation and they always exchange a few e-mails with someone who is cancelling.
Personally, I am usually happy to give feedback to fellow business folks, and I wouldn't be offended if someone politely asked for it from a service I was cancelling. However, if a single reasonable action to cancel and no further contact resulted in my card being charged because I didn't play along, that service should not expect a happy outcome.
We don't hassle. You send an email saying "Hey, I want to cancel!"
We respond with: "Bummer to hear, but happy to take care of that for you. Anything we could have done better?"
Then that usually sparks a longer conversation, but if we don't hear back within 24-48 hours, we just go ahead with the cancellation.
We're also very generous with refunds and certainly wouldn't keep someone's money just because we delayed the cancellation a day or two. That's just silly.
Thank you. We're on the same page wrt emailing us to cancel. A quarter of our churn is actually users who have their cc declined and do not fix it, despite nag emails, in two weeks. I don't think we've ever heard back from a single one of these users. For the other 75% I guess we should just be asking more questions before servicing their request.
Hey, I used to run a SaaS product that solved the failed payment problem very specifically (http://churnbuster.io) and I'd recommend you extend that 2 week period out to something like 4 to 6 weeks. Some of our most successful customers were sending out 7-8 emails over a 6 week period. Every business is different, so YMMV, but it might help. A bunch of other thoughts on the subject that may be helpful to you here: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-industry-average-rates-fo... .
While we're throwing out ways to solve CC declines with other solutions, Baremetrics actually has this very thing built in. :) https://baremetrics.com/dunning
And I agree our lack of preparedness to scale was part of this, but it's shortsighted to only look at a simple conversation rate for determining success.
"Success" is relative and we define it on a higher level than just conversion. The fact is, software isn't infinitely scalable...or rather it takes orders of magnitude more resources for it to approach that level.
There's a certain inflection point where the time spent "getting prepared" simply outweighs the potential benefits. We could have spent years "getting prepared" but there was a point where we just had to say "ship it"...and that's what we did.