Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfk13 | Hacker News Reader

If that were my service, I'd be pretty embarrassed by the number of unhappy users who have commented on the blog posts about cancellation[1] and refunds[2]. Doesn't seem like a good look.

[1] https://www.gmass.co/blog/how-to-cancel-your-paid-gmail-mail...

[2] https://www.gmass.co/blog/request-a-refund/

View on HN

> You clicked the wrong button. Please re-read the instructions.

Probably not the best customer response I've seen from someone doing customer service.

As a learning lesson for others out there with a SaaS service. If you cannot have a phone number for support, absolutely provide a clear and easy to find email address for support. The people who tend to be the most likely to not understand the cancellation process, or have other similar issues, have a large intersection with the people who will have difficulty contacting you via something other than phone or email.

Agreed. I was arrogant in some of my blog post comments. I've changed my tune since then. For me, gaining confidence in my product and gaining traction turned me into a more customer-service friendly person.

I was just giving you a tough time there with that. We've all been there. I certainly have.

Customer service is always full of challenges and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about things you've learned and changed since then to make support more streamlined. It tends to be one of the earliest scaling challenges new companies face.

I like your admittance to prior arrogance instead of doubling down.

>> You clicked the wrong button. Please re-read the instructions.

> Probably not the best customer response I've seen from someone doing customer service.

Right. It may be perfectly accurate, but it doesn't come across as at all sympathetic or helpful -- especially to an already-frustrated user. I also suspect a good number of those users are not native English speakers, making the (lengthy) instructions even more likely to be a source of confusion.

If you don’t have support@ as an email address that actually reads the inbound messages you’re doing it wrong. Ditto for billing@, legal@, dmca@, and shibboleet@ (unpublished of course).

It's not something I'm proud of, but I'm not embarrassed by it either. The upset commenters are the minority of our users. Some parts of our UI are a little difficult -- most commands have to be done via the Gmail Compose window, because we want the entire experience to be inside Gmail. That workflow is unnatural for some.

Great story, thanks for sharing.

ajaygoel you are an inspiration! Thanks for sharing your story!

Still, given the number of people who seem to be having trouble with it, maybe it'd be worth re-thinking that design?

Given the number of people that (reportedly) paying for it, maybe it's good enough.

Making it difficult to cancel is not a good way to keep churn down. It's going to come back and bite him if that's the way it still works. His customers are clearly telling him the current system is broken.

I hear you, except you don’t address the refunds and cancellations concerns. I now have a habit of only using software that makes refunds and cancellations pain free. I shouldn’t have to email you to cancel, this is just creating a false barrier to make your users life more difficult so maybe they won’t cancel and you can get another charge out of them. The fact that you believe this impacts a small minority of users and your overall response to this is very disconcerting. This impacts all of your users, only some of them are complaining. I also guarantee that you aren’t reaching your full potential because people are reading those comments and not signing up in the first place.

Cancellation is instant and doesn't require an email being sent. You'll see that in the post.

You may be right. A better solution might be to build an external UI for account management, but I've shied away from that, wanting to keep everything inside Gmail. Maybe in the future though.

I think you should have the email set up not to bounce and cancel accounts sent to that address just as readily as you cancel when they press the magic button. A lot of headaches and bad will considering anyone can cancel with their credit card and you might get screwed by your payment processor.

What about the upset users who just don't publicly comment? Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean users are happy with it.

It might help to separate out business functions from the product itself.

From your comment on the blog: > Like I’ve explained above, cancel@gmass.co is not an email address.

To the average user, it certainly looks like an email address. Maybe just have it act like a normal email and list it under the support section of your website: https://www.gmass.co/#contact

About 90% of the complaints there seem to be from users who have obviously not read the instructions in the linked page. About 10% seem to be from users who are being charged after cancellation which is a bit worrying.

Users not reading the instructions... what a world.

Also I find it helpful when dealing with users to mentally replace users with people or humans, users sounds like someone with a drug addiction, they are people each of which is different and has their own priorities - genuine empathy goes a long way with people, treating them as interchangeable blobs not so much.

Sounds like you could use some empathy towards people with drug addictions.

I'm sure he's happy to have made $115k in a month and he doesn't really care about anything else.

If that were my service, I'd be pretty embarrassed by the number of unhappy users who have commented on the blog posts about cancellation[1] and refunds[2]. Doesn't seem like a good look.

And if my business was turning over $115k/Month I'm not sure I would let that keep me awake at night.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com