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Comment by Shpigford | Hacker News Reader

At the crux of it is not allowing self-serve cancellation. I know, boo, hiss, burn us at the stake. ;) We wrote a little bit about that here: https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-we-reduced-churn

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.

Also, Exit Interviews: http://www.extendslogic.com/business/jobs-to-be-done-cancel-...

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Big surprise: doing a scummy business practice straight out of the Comcast playbook helps you to hold on to users.

Any service which lets me sign up online but not cancel online is incredibly distasteful.

You can cancel online, just send an email. Comparing this to Comcast's service is hyperbole.

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.

That all seems pretty reasonable to me, then.

@morgante Big surprise: Someone who's never tried it from a business perspective complains about it on Hacker News. :)

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.

For the cc declined customers, you may want to look into http://churnbuster.io/

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

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