Your Customers Want You to Stop Hiding the Cancel Button
It’s time to stop hiding your cancel button
To all you subscription businesses out there, we need to have a conversation.
It’s time to stop hiding your cancel button.
Free your customers to cancel your subscription service online, with minimal effort, and you might be surprised.
It might be contrarian to say it, but your business results may improve by implementing this customer-friendly practice.
How did frustrating the customer become a standard practice?
Standard UX advice for something you don’t want your customers to do? Make it hard to find.
Unfortunately, this advice has permeated through subscription-based businesses. A quick audit of any consumer subscription business reveals just how hard it is to cancel.
Our own audits of happy head and splendid spoon reveal bad behavior on the part of companies. Hiding the cancel flow buttons or downright not having a way to cancel online is unfortunately common.
Customer first? Hardly…Brightback’s 2021 State of Industry report clearly showed that consumers prefer to cancel online.
Hiding your cancel button will frustrate your customers, guaranteed.
There's another important reason to avoid hiding the cancel button -- regulations. Both California and New York have passed regulations that mandate easy online cancelation for any subscription purchased online. California's regulations, which just passed are very specific that California residents can cancel “without any further steps that obstruct or delay the consumer’s ability to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service immediately.”
But won’t making it easy to cancel increase cancellations?
In the short run and all other things being equal, making it easier to cancel can increase cancellations. Customers might just give up trying to cancel their subscription out of frustration.
But, if approached with empathy and in a customer-centric manner, we’ve found that a positive customer experience creates long term business success.
The thing most companies are missing out on by hiding the cancel button is that cancellation is a point of customer feedback. And any product manager or marketer worth their salt will tell you that feedback is a gift.
It goes something like this:
Instead of hiding the cancellation button, the business uses the online cancellation flow as a way to collect feedback and data on customers who cancel. This feedback leads to valuable product insights and potential win-back campaigns to re-acquire customer who have churned.
These insights are fed back into the product and result in product improvements
The business uses these insights to power intelligent cancellation flow offers that ultimately save more customers than hiding the cancel flow.
Customers are more satisfied overall and LTV/Retention increases
It’s not hard to build a smart cancel flow
Brightback has a trial that allows you to build a simple cancel flow, with a survey, within a few days.
Check it out here.
