> We formalized a process to enable our customer team (account reps & support) to give anyone trial extensions if they had a real need... folks that received a trial extension were 2.5X more likely to convert and 5X more likely to upgrade at some future point.
I'm glad there's data (at least for one company) to support what was always my intuition. Many companies are hesitant to offer a trial extension, but the cost of doing so in most cases seems absolutely trivial. Now that at least some data is out there, perhaps more people will adopt this pattern.
> Another successful change was to change how we handled existing paid accounts that had a billing issue and were to be downgraded. In the past we would just downgrade those accounts to a Free plan, send an email and that was it. From talking to some customers we realized that some people would get downgraded and not notice that their functionality had changed.
I wonder, isn't there some way you could know ahead of time that the account might experience billing issues and send them a warning email before their account is downgraded? Assuming you have their credit card information, at least one issue you could anticipate is their card's expiration. As a customer, I'd prefer the heads-up notice as opposed to something after-the-fact. My takeway instead of "make it obvious when people are auto-downgraded" would be, "prevent people from being auto-downgraded at all," if you can.