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> Why do MBAs keep pushing this? Are they TRYING to exchange short term retention for long term viability?

Isn't that the stereotype? Join to juice some metric, jump ship while everything looks green, leave the mess to someone else

Seagulls. Swarm a pretty beach, shit all over the place and fly off again.

Of course, this doesn’t exclusively apply to MBAs. I’ve seen plenty of consultants and developers do the same.

Swoop and poop.

It’s not just a stereotype it’s often their explicit job description! They get hired or promoted with a performance metric for juicing those metrics either as an expectation of the job or as a requirement for performance incentives and bonus pay…

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.

I think that corporate sponsorship of education needs of to be outlawed. We've had at least three generations of exponential feedback of antisocial principles dominating business education. Taking much longer to go hockey stick. MBAs can't keep resting on the laurels of bringing the first GI Bill gen from draft to serving technical competence to industrial relevance. For a start the foundation for the qualification is absolutely rooted in post war growth imperatives.

By the way, at some companies where you are sponsored to go there is a 90%+ acceptance rate of people into business school. It is effectively a 'backdoor' into MBA programs. They like them because the same companies come on campus to recruit and hire people back into their company. It's a nice circle to be inside, but locks others out.

this sound like natural selection, if they decide to support the education that only generated employees who give their company negative influences.

I worked for a company that used A/B testing to justify call-to-cancel; makes me angry every time I think about it. I guess that's one of the tricky things about A/B testing - it is easy to measure that call-to-cancel decreases customer churn, not so easy to measure the number of people that will never sign up for your service or the number of customers that do churn and swear to never use you again.

And, word of mouth is still a thing, which no advertising buddget can fix, when deeply bad, toxic, prevalent.

Just go the nestle route and don't put your name on 90% of your products.

I cancelled my years long nytimes subscription a few years ago once someone told me that they had to call in and suffer through customer service retention reps in order to cancel their sub. I just couldn't stand the thought of being bled for cash due to their making it too inconvenient for subscribers to cancel.

I used to tell the newspaper I was moving to Madagascar because they wouldn't have that on their script. Now they'll just push the electronic edition.

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.

Try telling them you're going to prison instead. I can't imagine they'll have an inmate edition.

They're piloting a tablet program in the Feds. The tablet is free. They even offer free books. Nice, right? What they don't advertise is that the system also charges something like a dollar a minute to 'use'. Wonder what those free books actually come out to costing. So far this is only in the womens prisons. I'm sure they will use it as an excuse to get rid of the actually library that inmates donate all the books sent from home to. Wrote way too much to say soon they might.

It's in some county jails too.

"I'm going in for assisted suicide tomorrow, and getting my affairs in order."

I appreciate this as darkly humorous, but there is the off chance they send the police around to check on you.

I've used "I was a temporary worker and my visa expired" with great success.

Rotfl, the ultimate in customer retention.

Customer detention.

Does it work to repeat "I'd like to cancel my subscription" over and over again, without answering their questions?

If so, why isn't this more prevalent?

I’ve always felt like the rule should be really simple: whatever means allow you to sign up should allow you to cancel too.

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.

> The harder a service is to cancel, the more unlikely I am to ever re-subscribe.

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.

This is a service provided by the card companies. For instance here's Visa's: https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau

The customers they lost don't show up on any metric.

I've often wondered about how to measure aversion instead of conversion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

> 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.

was mcnamara autistic?

My guess is that the MBAs are right, and losing the business of people like you is outweighed by larger gains.

They're usually right that juicing their numbers in the short term means they can cash out with higher stock and better bonuses in the next 5 years.

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?

And by "people like me" you mean customers that don't want a business to treat them poorly?

Once you understand that most people live in a semi-conscious state because of mental overwhelm, physical frailty, and general life problems, abusive business practices such as this one, loan sharks, etc., start making a lot of sense.

No, people who will do something about it.