The Retention Blog by Brightback

It has been a busy start to 2022, starting with the big announcement of Brightback's acquisition by Chargebee in January. Brightback will continue growing as a standalone product, benefiting from significant new investment to innovate and evolve our product retention methodologies, and to grow our team and customer base.

We have also deployed a steady stream of product improvements, and here is a round up of recent key releases - with a packed roadmap and plenty more to come:

• Audience and Experiences filters in all Brightback reports
• Activity and error log for exposing key events and debugging issues (Settings)
• Map your Survey Reasons to Brightback’s new Reason Categories specialized for E-commerce, Digital, SaaS for improved categorization and benchmarking
• New Offer Conversion Rate lets you view the percentage of accepted Offers that convert to a Saved subscriber at the end of the Watch List period (in Offer Insights)
• Manage cancel settings globally or via page-level overrides, so you can define automated + human post-cancel workflows

Read on for more about each of these.

Audience & Experience Filters in Reports

One of our most highly requested features has been to filter Brightback reports by Audience (as created in the Audience Manager) or by Experience (the cancel page the user was routed to). With this release, you now can apply said filters across any of your Brightback Reports. This enables you to slice and dice your Deflection performance in order to:

• analyze how each of your Audiences are performing relative to one another or your controls, and across your core deflection performance metrics
• visualize how Deflection and Save Performance is trending by Audience
• compare reasons why different customer groups (e.g. high and low LTV audiences) are canceling or deflecting
• understand how early vs. late lifecycle customers respond to offers

This enhanced granularity in your reporting opens a wealth of opportunities to double click on what's working and where you can improve. Learn more at our help doc.

Activity Log in Brightback Settings

Another common customer feature request has been the ability to browse and filter a log of key activities that occur in the Brightback cancel experience, with the ability to view by error or activity type, enabling developers and admins to easily act and debug.

We are pleased to release the first version of our Activity Log (found in Brightback Settings). This surfaces the key events triggered by your users when they visit the Cancel Experience, as well as the corresponding outcomes (e.g. error, warning or success). We will iterate the functionality of this error and activity log in coming months, but wanted to get this initial version out for you to start using. For more details on this activity log, view our help doc and feel free to drop us feedback at support@brightback.com with specific requests.

Survey Reason Categories

As covered in a recent blog post, we have expanded the Brightback Survey Reason Library to better support e-commerce, SaaS, and digital consumer businesses. Each now have their own Brightback reasons, which map to relevant Reason Categories, enabling all subscription services to track relevant, accurate cancel reasons. Leverage Brightback's cancel categories and reasons for inspiration, as well as for benchmarked intelligence (in future months).

Use Brightback's cancel categories and reasons to inspire your own cancel survey, and to view benchmarked intelligence (coming soon).

• New customers see these categories when they visit the Reason Library, and can browse and pick reasons from within their Business Model and Category.
• Existing customers who launched Brightback prior to November 2021 can go into their Survey Reason Library and remap their Cancel Reasons to the re-categorized business type, which will help improve the accuracy of future benchmarking features.

Offer Conversion Rate

Our customers frequently ask, how do I know which Offers, when accepted, are actually saving customers from leaving? This can now be answered in the Offer Performance Report, where we replaced the Offer Save Rate with the new and improved metric: Offer Conversion Rate.

The Offer Conversion Rate is the percentage of your Offer accepts that convert to a Save in Brightback for the given time period you are viewing. This rate is calculated as Offer Accepts that are Saved / Total Offer Accepts that are eligible to be Saved.

For more information on this new metric and Offer Performance in general, visit this help doc.

Manage Cancels via Billing at the App or Page Level

Brightback allows you to process your cancel requests directly via the Billing API if you use one of our supported Billing Integrations (Chargebee, Stripe or Recurly). Additionally, now you may configure Manage Cancels to apply either globally (at the App-level) or locally on a per-page basis. Doing so at the Page-level gives you the granular control to set some pages to process cancels automatically via integration, while setting some pages to process cancels by another means (e.g. support case).

A common use case here, is to automate the cancellation of high volume, self-service customers, while routing high-value / enterprise customer cancel requests to their CSM to engage directly prior to canceling. This is a common feature request for several of our customers who are using our existing Manage Cancels feature, and with the latest set of releases you can now update these configurations to match your desired workflow. For more on how to set Manage Cancels at the page level, read our help doc.