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Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just afte
by Silhouette 6y ago
Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just after they've renewed for another period.
Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well.
In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by putting through a cancellation that was going to happen anyway a bit sooner, we generate positive sentiment. We often get a nice thank-you message back, with extra information about why someone was cancelling or hadn't been using the app recently.
We know for a fact that we have sometimes gained new customers from referrals by those people we helped out a little. Sometimes a former customer's situation changes again later and they come back to us, too.
And the reality is that particularly with online payment methods, there's also a small risk that someone will do a hostile chargeback without bothering to even try cancelling, particularly if they forgot about a subscription and changed their email address or something like that. Even if you've done nothing wrong and provide evidence accordingly, you have a good chance of losing a dispute anyway, and one way or another it ends up costing you more than it would have done to preemptively cancel a subscription that you knew wasn't being used for a long time.
This is from the perspective of a small business in a niche market, where there is definitely a sense of community and reputation does matter. We've met some of our customers in person, and there are many more mutual connections or friend-of-friend kinds of relationships that might be relevant one day. Maybe things work differently when you're running a huge business with a strong brand in a huge market; I've never done that, so I wouldn't know. But I honestly can't imagine why we'd want to run things any other way. There are few things more valuable to a business like ours than a good reputation in the community we cater for.
- Stratoscope 6y agoI know you don't want to self-promote yourself needlessly here, but do you mind if I ask the name of your company? With a positive attitude like yours, it seems like something I would want to know about.
- Silhouette 6y agoThank you, I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately if I told you that, I might inadvertently be outing other parties as well through my comment history, and I don't think that would be fair. I hope that our policies aren't that unusual anyway. We're just a small business run by real people and trying to treat our customers as real people too.
- seer 6y agoWhat a great attitude! I wish more businesses were like that. I had to leave a startup once, that I as a senior dev managed to drag to profitability, because I saw how they treated their customers. It was such a sad experience- while helping out with the customer side I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality. I mean yeah they did get a fair amount of money from those schemes, but they did loose all of their senior devs in the process.
- Silhouette 6y agoI was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality. I personally don't think routine cancellation policy should even be up to the business. Deliberately preventing customers from cancelling a subscription that they are entitled to cancel, or making it unreasonably difficult or intimidating to do so, should be grounds for legal or regulatory intervention to protect consumer rights. A basic rule along the lines that subscription services must provide a means of cancelling that would normally be no more demanding than the means of starting the same subscription seems fair to me.