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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

My favorite trick in this ever is step 2 of Seomoz's cancellation flow.

Step 1 (after clicking Cancel My Account): "We often find that people cancel for one of the following three reasons. Here's our most persuasive microcopy possible on why that wouldn't be a good idea, two sentences each, with links to longer explanations. [Wow, That's Awesome] [No Thanks, Cancel My Account]

Step 2 (the genius bit): "OK, your account is canceled. Your service will remain active until $DATE. We will happily extend this to $DATE + 7 days and then cancel your account with absolutely no funny business if you take this brief exit survey."

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Blizzard has done this basically forever. If you want a great example of a cancellation flow, try to unsubscribe from World of Warcraft.

Step 2 (the genius bit): "OK, your account is canceled. Your service will remain active until $DATE. We will happily extend this to $DATE + 7 days and then cancel your account with absolutely no funny business if you take this brief exit survey."

Was the account really cancelled at the end of the first sentence? It sounds like it won't actually be cancelled until either $DATE or $DATE + 7 days.

I believe you pre-pay for a month, so your account is canceled in that you won't be charged any more... but you also already paid for use through $DATE.

Ah, that was the missing link that prevented me from understanding what was so ingenious about it. That does sound very clever, thanks for explaining.

To be fair, most people who do that go overboard and make it too difficult to cancel and that just means an extreemly angry customer who feels violated.

And you don't want that, because they lead to chargebacks.

That's awesome. What's interesting though is that (in my experience at least) you get a fair amount of "cancel my account ASAP and delete all the data" users. I wonder if there's any data on how Step 2 plays out in that situation.

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