> I should be able to easily unsubscribe from anything without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. I don't want to have to speak with anyone on the phone, nor should I be forced to tell you why I'm unsubscribing.
As a consumer, I usually want the exact same thing, and it annoys me when I get prodded for reasons. Feels like talking to pushy car salesmen sometimes, and makes me tense & clam up.
More recently as a business owner, I'm surprised when people pay me money, and then later cancel and refuse to talk about what they were looking for before they gave me money. I can (and do) help save people money when they ask for things I don't have, and I can recommend other services that do what they're looking for. Sometimes people who cancel reach out to me to vent their anger for paying for something they didn't want, and still won't discuss what they wanted.
It's an absolute mantra of the startup business world to iterate your product based on customer feedback, so you can imagine one has to get creative to gather enough feedback to have statistical meaningfulness in the era where response rates & attention spans are dropping off a cliff and internet noise is through the roof. The majority of meaningful feedback I can get is limited to 'paid and hasn't canceled yet', 'paid and canceled' and 'visited but didn't pay'. I want to fix the problems when people cancel, I want to give them what they're looking for, but it's pretty hard to find that out. (Always has been, btw, and I believe the consumer has 0 responsibility to say anything, just noting my sympathy with both sides.)
I don't want to force anyone to say why, but I do want to offer the chance to give feedback. I do want to have a conversation about what you need, and it really does sometimes happen that people cancel because they think a feature isn't there that actually is there.
Anyway, I don't mean to defend Adobe in any way, their actions here are unreasonable IMO, but for smaller less monopolistic less bullying companies, where there's a reasonable chance the employees will hear & respond to your feedback, maybe even make changes for you, it might actually be to your benefit to use the annoying popups to ask questions before subscribing & after unsubscribing. I wouldn't expect Adobe to do this, but I usually give out coupons & extend trials anytime people ask, I frequently respond to feature requests with new features, and ever since my new perspective on feedback UI has been altered by my own business, and I've started being more willing to ask questions & share feedback, I've found a lot more business with people like me that will respond in ways that help me get what I want.