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Comment by ianvisits | Hacker News Reader

A leason I learned many long years ago is not to treat a customer cancelling a subscription as a lost customer, but as a customer going on holiday from you.

When you make the cancellation process smooth and friendly, if that customer is reconsidering at a later date, they will remember that their last interaction with you was a pleasent one.

If it's hard to unsubscribe - then their last memory is a bad one, and it's even harder to persuade that person to resubsubscribe again.

This is admitedly more applicable to industries with a lot of annual churn between suppliers - such as insurance, internet providers, power suppliers etc -- but it should be a rule of thumb for all companies.

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Good lord yes. I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal for a bit, but then ended up low on cash and needing to cut back on spending. Of all the subscriptions I stopped at that time, they were the most annoying. Because, even though I was able to sign up easily online, there was no way to cancel other than calling them. That disparity in ease between starting and stopping my subscription is why I will never pay them again.

NYTimes used to be like this, but last time I looked they had fixed it. Making unsubscribing hard is just such a slimy dark pattern. Immediately creates anger and hatred from users. I guess someone has demonstrated math that shows it is more profitable in some cases, but it is still disgusting.

Can confirm that the NYT has fixed it, as I recently went to go see how much of a pain in the ass it was to cancel. I was at least considering cancelling because I just don't read NYT enough to really justify the expense. Since it's such a huge PITA, I chose a day when I had some time, because by golly I'm sticking with the process to the end, no matter how long I sit on hold with "customer retention".

Oh, you can just click a few "are you sure?" buttons, and that's it? All done online? Well, it isn't that much money every month, and I do read the NYT. If I can easily cancel, then...oh, what the heck, let's keep the subscription.

But I had to pick up a phone that day...

I cancelled my NYT subscription a couple of years ago and had to chat with customer "service" to cancel. One of the things they asked me about was keeping the crossword subscription ($20/year), which I might have done. But I was so irritated by the annoying process that I just wanted to cancel everything. So they definitely lost money thanks to their "customer retention" tactics.

Same here. And you have to call on East Coast business hours (I'm west coast). I am a crossword aficionado and would enjoy having the NYT crossword puzzle fresh each day. No way am I keeping a subscription that was so hard to cancel.

> I guess someone has demonstrated math that shows it is more profitable in some cases

Don't underestimate how deeply, fundamentally, mind-bogglingly incompetent most decision-makers are at most companies. Not only do these people have no evidence to suggest it's more profitable (long-term, anyway), they literally do not care. The vast majority of decisions made at the vast majority of corporations in the U.S. today are driven by the Principal Agent Problem, made by people who will never be held account for any of their decisions, nor suffer any consequence for any downstream or long-term effects of anything they do. It's all just a game of who can suck the most blood out of the company short-term before finding another host. These virulent parasites will never give a shit about such mundane concepts as "supporting data".

I'm convinced this is one of the most significant social problems in the U.S. A huge number of American adults spend a third of their lives in an environment where there is no acting towards a common good, and in many cases are actively encouraged to behave in antisocial, cutthroat ways towards other people. There is no way everybody just leaves that at work when they go home and suddenly become good and caring citizens. That's not even counting all of the direct damage they cause directly through the business itself.

It was changed because of a California law IIRC.

The Wall Street Journal lets you cancel your subscription if your address is in California, but not if it's in another state. If I wanted to cancel my subscription, I'm just going to pretend to move to California for a day or two. Maybe that's fraud and I'll go to prison for the rest of my life, but it's still better than calling them.

>” I'm just going to pretend to move to California for a day or two. Maybe that's fraud and I'll go to prison for the rest of my life, but it's still better than calling them.”

That’s the best part, California’s prisons are over capacity so you’re likely just going to be given parole and community service! /s

No downsides!

When I canceled my NYT Crossword subscription (they got rid of the convenient .puz file format that could be downloaded), I had to call.

I found the CA law and explained to them how what they were forcing me to do was illegal in the state of CA, started citing the law, and the NYT rep immediately tried to cut me off so it wouldn't be recorded, I assume.

If they've truly changed things, good for them.

They're never getting another cent from me.

I was low on money and cancelled my Audible subscription for a month only to realize I lost all my tokens. I never resubscribed because of that.

I later learned that they have some special limited "pause subscription" mode that retains tokens, but I didn't see that when I was cancelling, and I shouldn't have to research different ways to cancel a subscription.

I just cancelled audible this morning, and did not see any pause subscription. It may have been there, but I was annoyed with other dark patterns. "no! i want to stay subscribed!" as a bright orange button, and "continue cancellation" as a muted grey button, for example.

When subscribed to audible through apple I get "your credits never expire" clause... I've cancelled my subscription, subsequently restarted when I need more credits, and cancelled again... still have 4 credits.

Exactly, I failed to cancel the subscription the first time due to probably that dark pattern.

I pressed the Submit button but the next page fooled me so I thought I could close the browser tab.

I realized I was still charged a few days later, I went back to ensure I was cancelled where I realized I didn't complete the flow because you have to click "Continue cancellation" on the page that you land on despite thinking you’ve completed the process.

Nice lil F U on the way out.

Exact same experience, I signed up for them as part of a class in college and honestly liked their reporting. If they hadn't made me call them and sit through a call center lecture I would probably be paying for them now that I have money.

Both the WSJ and the NYT used to be awful. But now, in California, this sort of thing is no longer a problem. We have a rule here that subscribing online means you should be able to cancel online.

I checked the date on the linked article and it's from yesterday. online "geo-ip" stuff always says i live in georgia, dallas, or oklahoma - and one time tacoma!

I'm not sure this is as solved as you envision.

Huh, that's interesting. I suppose I'm lucky my IP shows me as being in SJ. TIL.

Dallas makes the most sense as that's where at&t's fiber terminates from this area. If i lived a little further south it would go to either georgia or whatever major city is along I-10 in texas, don't feel like looking at the map.

Starlink used to show me near chicago, but now is pretty consistently also dallas. T-mo is most likely to show me on the east coast.

I live in Central Louisiana.

That makes me want to subscribe to companies' services like this even less: if they need a law to force them to treat customers right, then I really don't want to give them my money.

My worst is a similar financial institution, which bills monthly and contracts annually.

This is why I like subscribing to things through iOS (and iPadOS). There’s one place I can check to see all my subscriptions and stop any of them with a click or two.

When I want to subscribe to something on my iPad, I don’t think about it very long because I know it’s going to be easy to quit. It will sometimes cost more but I’ve been happy to pay it because that’s what easy quitting is worth to me.

And this is why the most clamor for sideloading etc on iOS is from other companies, not users: They would love to fleece the users with as few interventions in between as possible.

Sideloading would absolutely benefit users. Even just being able to choose and install your own web browser would have enormous benefits. Android users know.

See, this right here: it's almost always someone speaking for others.

Sure, not everybody is going to share my opinion, and many if not most iPhone users aren't informed enough on the matter to even have an opinion.

My mom doesn't even know the word sideloading, but it doesn't mean she wouldn't benefit from being given actual ownership of her device.

Plenty of users just want to be able to buy some particular thing that Apple doesn't like for whatever reason.

Exactly. My personal example: wanting to cancel due to shady advertising practices, my newspaper said i owed them money for an additional subscription I didn't make, and then threatened to send it to a collection agency.

I hate to turn my back on local news, but its owned by Gannett now who've ruined it, so I guess I'm ok with it failing. Sad though...

Yep, when I switched away from Sprint, it was a huge pain, switching from T-Mobile was so easy I felt a little bad for them being so helpful. Of course, the choice doesn't really exist anymore, but I was only interested in going back to one of them.

And not just that person, but everyone else as word gets around. Another commentor mentions Wall Street Journal; I’ve often considered subscribing to WSJ, but the horror stories I’ve heard about unsubscribing have pushed me away.

The Economist's unsubscription process is also terrible: looong hold on the phone and then many minutes of repeating to the person on the other end, no I'm not going to reconsider, cancel my subscription. It's a great magazine but heaven help you if you decide to stop getting it.

And, as suggested above, this has actually kept me from re-subscribing again later.

Thanks for sharing. I've heard they're good, but comments like this and my firsthand experience with other publications makes me feel better about not subscribing to anything.

I don't understand why companies don't think this way. AT&T and Verizon both screwed me on the way out. Verizon decided to suck $15 more, and since I wasn't expecting another last bill, It got a $15 late fee so they got $30 out of me. In exchange, I've banned them from my life. AT&T made cancelling a royal pain in the ass, and also slapped me with some stupid fee.

T-Mobile, Google Fi, Ting, and (somewhat) Mint mobile all made it really easy to leave. I've been back to them a few times and I recommend them to others in my life. That $30 from Verizon cost them $100 per month in revenue for what likely would have been many, many years. It's just such a silly short-term approach IMHO.

Sometimes a particular company is exceptionally bad (looking at you, Comcast), and leaving them as a statement is a fine solution. But in general, what I feel I've learned, I can't boycot every company that treats me poorly, because I'd not have anyone left to take my business to. People vote with their feet, or something, but only up to a point, I guess.

The poster you replied to named a bunch of mobile phone service companies that treated him well. (I can personally vouch for several of those same companies BTW: I had no trouble leaving them.) Why would you not boycott companies that treat you like crap, when there are clear alternatives that don't?

They were talking about it being hard/easy to leave, which seemed like a single data point. I'm on T-Mobile, and I like them, and I'm not surprised to hear that they have good support for leaving. But I still have had at least one experience where I had to furiously remove myself from their store over some bs they pulled. Should I now boycott them? I'm not even talking about the principle of second chances, but just that I'd run out of providers real quick if I had to boycott them for every one or two offences, as much as maybe I'd like to.

There's dozens of mobile providers. What kind of "bs" are they pulling that you'd want to boycott them all? I had several in the US, and all the smaller ones (MVNOs) were fine: they did exactly what they claimed as far as billing and level of service. The only reason I left any of them was because I found better network coverage, or moved. I honestly don't understand why you'd want to support a company that treats you poorly when you have SO many alternatives.

Misplaced incentives. Hardly anyone is recognized, let alone rewarded, for the good impact of something they did years ago (like implement customer friendly policies); yet, they’re immediately penalized for what looks bad on a spreadsheet (like losing a customer, e.g. by letting them leave without repercussion such as termination fees).

> not to treat a customer cancelling a subscription as a lost customer, but as a customer going on holiday from you.

I'm really surprised that so many companies don't understand this. It's just the old wisdom of "don't burn your bridges".

> When you make the cancellation process smooth and friendly, if that customer is reconsidering at a later date, they will remember that their last interaction with you was a pleasent one.

When I purchase a new subscription the first thing I do is cancel renewal so I can do it manually. When a site makes this easy I'm actually much more likely to end up re-subscribing and leaving it on automatic since I know I'll be able to have peace of mind and cancel any time.

> A leason I learned many long years ago is not to treat a customer cancelling a subscription as a lost customer, but as a customer going on holiday from you.

I was waiting for "so that's why we re-subscribe customers after a 6-month hiatus / every time we update our mail delivery service". At least that's what some companies have done to me...

This is why I keep coming back to Netflix. It's a simple process to subscribe or unsubscribe. I don't find enough interesting content to fill 12 months of use but I love that I can watch for a couple months, go away for the summer, and then pick it up again as the days get colder and darker from my sofa with just a remote or a click of the trackpad.

Yep. I wanted to temporarily cancel the NY Times. The process was horrible and the first time I called they said it would cancel at the end of the month and it didn't so I had to call them again and go through the whole horrible process again.

I will never resubscribe again because the cancellation process was so horrible.

what is really funny is that someone with an MBA was working behind the scenes to claim this suscriber churn flow dark pattern was A/B tested, and the test "conclusively demonstrated" that action B (hiding the cancel/forcing user to call/etc) resulted in XX % less churn, ergo resulting in additional YY revenue/quarter.

Yet, anyone with basic reading comprehension can read this thread, and conclude these dark patterns are destroying the brand with existing customers.

And...those customers are not coming back. Ever.

Where is the A/B test for brand suicide ?

> A leason I learned many long years ago

How did you, exactly, learn this lession? Or you just personally hope that the world would work like this?

But what if their strategy makes more sense because most people give up and keep their subscription in the first place?

How can they know for sure though? It's not like they can look at their spreadsheets and definitively say "these subscribers over here" wanted to cancel but stayed because they couldn't figure it out.

A/B testing?

This is a great way to think about it, and upon reflection I definitely operate in this way.

I'd love SiriusXM at the promo rates they offer, or even at full price in a month where I know I'll be on the road for a while. I will never re-subscribe because they make cancelling so hostile.

They’ve (SiriusXM) made cancelling a lot easier as of late. They even give partial refunds and let you pause. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but I have been able to hop on and off over the last year without major heartburn.

How does it work now? When I did it twice before (including semi-recently), I could only do it via chat or over the phone - either option took about 5 minutes and required talking with somebody.

This perfectly describes why I refuse to ever re-subscribe to the New York Times.

Adobe I'm looking at you.

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