But, to nobody’s surprise, the MBAs don’t like options where the user doesn’t give away money by accident.
Auto renew is one of those things that should be illegal to default users into.
That's something they need to start studying in business/MBA school. That SOME customer churn reduction strategies directly lead to indefinite loss of customers.
To give a specific anecdote: Ooma offers a very interesting service, hassle-free "landline" (VoIP) turn-key phone service, the price is reasonable, and they have multiple offerings to suite many needs. I wanted to use them for a specific project, but cancelling was so toxic (call to cancel, waste my time to cancel, argue to cancel, etc) that after cancelling once instead of re-subing next time like I had PLANNED I went to a competitor. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ooma/comments/7he9zh/my_two_attempt...
So they lost a customer for life. Verizon lost a customer for life. SiriusXM lost a customer for life. All because cancellation was a PITA. Why do MBAs keep pushing this? Are they TRYING to exchange short term retention for long term viability? Why is business education so bad?
I feel like Costco, LEGO, or Ikea need to open a business school or something, just to teach a generation of people who want a business to survive a hundred years and go from one success to another. MBA education in the US feels like a "pump and dump" scheme right now.
Isn't that the stereotype? Join to juice some metric, jump ship while everything looks green, leave the mess to someone else
This all of course tends to be set up by fellow MBAs higher up the corporate food chain and since everyone keeps personally profiting no one sees any reason to stop, all the dead and destroyed companies were accidents, bad decisions, acts of god, etc… never due to systemic misunderstanding of business management principles… because that might actually be something the shareholders could sue over, and no one wants that, at a primal subconscious level it’s unthinkable.
Of course, this doesn’t exclusively apply to MBAs. I’ve seen plenty of consultants and developers do the same.
There is a cliff though where if you go over it you do alienate everyone and sentiment turns against the company and it'll fail. That isn't measurable though so nobody cares, and they'll just leave and land at a different company and try to juice it as well.
But overall with every business in the country doing this, it becomes pretty toxic. You're not actually producing things that people really want, you're producing things that maximally exploit consumers.
At some point, though, does the whole culture and economy fall over that cliff and you get systemic failure?
Adobe’s subscriptions are hell to cancel. It’s easier to cancel the credit card via the bank.
Btw, some time ago I was kinda shocked when Digital Ocean was able to charge an expired card of mine, multiple times.
The card had expired, and I had renewed it, but I didn’t have access to the DO account anymore, so I couldn’t update the card info. Somehow DO was still able to charge the expired card, and since I couldn’t access my account (and support wasn’t super helpful either), I had to contest the charge via the bank, about 5 times, until they finally cancelled the subscription and account.
The number of things I can do to modify my plans in-app - all except cancel - is not only striking, but clearly done maliciously. It’s a very deliberate decision that is easy to identify, there’s very little grey area.
Forcing people to call just to cancel is particularly evil.
One of the big problems is the CSR's only have incentives to retain people now. There is no extra penalty for alienating someone from ever coming back, it's the same as a non-renew.
With the web versions of this, every app that badgers me gets a 1 star review for badgering me by insisting that I review it. Every cancellation, I select "other" and tell them I don't do business with people that hold my subscription hostage until I answer questions.
Personally, I feel there is some fraud (or some other legal term here) going on when I press a "Cancel Subscription" button and it doesn't cancel. A regular confirmation box is fine and understandable, but they can't help but change the default colors and text on those, or word them oddly to make me want to back out. Bu "cancelling" followed up by mandatory questions/answers about why I'm quitting is forcing me to work for them building their data sets without compensation. Maybe I should send them a bill.
If so, why isn't this more prevalent?
I've often wondered about how to measure aversion instead of conversion.
> US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara,[3] who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important.
The subscription did give me full access to their articles. But it did nothing to eliminate the crap I really hate: interleaving of "sponsored content" with actual news, irrepressible autoplay videos, etc.
The unavoidable, usability-destroying advertising is why I cancelled almost immediately.
Easy to subscribe, hard to remove, and 0 costs to keep up accounts of people that don't use it, that sounds like a gym subscription to me.
- low-friction cancellation
- email users a few days before monthly renewals and twice before annual renewals
- ability to remove the payment method altogether
- don't require a credit card for a free trial
If cancellation takes effect immediately, the service should provide an immediate pro rata refund.
You get a new card and you have to make sure you migrate over all of your subscriptions and bill-pay to the new cc. Would be nice for Apple (or someone) to build more features around that so it's easy to see recurring charges and bills automatically.
That's why they do it I believe. But if they pair that up with subscription management it would be nice. Interestingly they do this exact thing with App Store subscriptions. You can cancel anytime it's done through Apple, and not the service/app you subscribed to.
This doesn't bother me as much as most of the other complaints here. How else can you keep someone from creating multiple accounts to get multiple free trials?
For non-sticky SaaS products, there may be a case for taking a credit card in order to prevent multiple free trials per credit card fingerprint, but there are alternatives, such as taking their phone number and sending a verification code. It's not foolproof, but it will stop the majority of free trial abuse.
A project management system is sticky, for example, because you can't easily take all your data out of it and put it into a different project management system that has different features.
A cold outreach SaaS isn't very sticky, because you can spam people for the trial period and then move on to the next cold outreach SaaS.
I activated the free trial for Apple Arcade because an ad for it was prominently shown in the settings app.
If you cancel the free trial, they immediately terminate the access. But worse: they did not send an email before charging the first non-free month. When I saw a €4.99 charge on my credit card, I canceled the trial (that I did not even use). I was disappointed about Apple using such dark patterns.
[1]: https://privacy.com
I wonder if there's a service that handles this kind of thing, it would be worth a subscription.
But guess what - it's in the interests of the business and the credit card company for me to keep paying
;-)
Thank you - that is actually a "solution" i will looking to it
"The service is prohibitively difficult to cancel" is a perfectly sensible justification for being unhappy with the service.
You allot a specific amount of money to one of their cards, then use that to sign up with.
It also claims to help keep your accounts a bit more safe, since if that data gets leaked, it's not your actual card number, but it's really more of centralizing the risk on Privacy's servers instead at 10 different vendors.
Is there an option to create virtual "credit" cards on Privacy? I only can make debit cards.
> This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t cancel.
In my mind: "If they are going to both make it hard to cancel, and charge me without prompting, then I am going to figure out how to cancel exactly right now and when it stops working, if I notice, then I'll go back and renew."
I've literally been warned not to sub to the New York Times by random people without prompting when the newspaper was mentioned in passing. Is that "growth hacking?" They've made having a subscription a life choice because cancellation is so painful, and they have so many predatory pricing dark patterns.