Better cancelation flows
One of the first things I’m working on at Fancy Hands is overhauling the account cancelation flow. For a subscription service, churn is probably one of the most important metrics you should be looking at, and it’s important to really understand why users are canceling, but more importantly, to think about how you can anticipate cancel attempts and try to ease the user’s pain to the point where they’re willing to give your product a second chance.
A simple trick I borrowed from my friend Spencer is to add a text field to the cancelation page so that users have a chance to provide their thoughts privately before closing their accounts. (I actually went much further, but more on that in a minute.) It’s a simple hack, but works surprisingly well; even though it’s completely optional, I’ve constantly been amazed - and humbled - by the quality and sincerity of the feedback that has through on Forrst’s, and now on Fancy Hands’ cancel forms.
Before diving in, the cancelation flow on Fancy Hands wasn’t much more than a link to cancel and a follow up email after the fact asking for feedback. While useful, it was usually a “too little, too late” outcome. After looking at the data we had, I redesigned the flow to anticipate the two most common reasons a user might want to cancel their account: they don’t feel it’s worth the price, or they just don’t know how to get the most out of the service.
Now, when a user wants to cancel, we give them two buttons front and center, one of which likely describes the reason they’re canceling. If it’s because of price, we’ll give them an instant, lifetime discount; if it’s because they’re not happy with us, we’ll connect them directly with the founder, Ted. In two clicks, we can potentially alleviate the user’s pain (and keep them as a customer). If they still want to cancel, they’re of course free to do so, and we provide that optional text field I spoke about earlier in case they’d like to share their thoughts privately with us.
This rolled out very recently, so there’s not enough data to really tune things yet, suffice to say we’ve already received some great feedback from canceling users. We’ll be keeping an eye on how this new flow is performing so that we can work towards a cancel flow that’s a win-win: we can turn users’ pain into happiness and keep them around as customers.
I’ll follow up with another post in a few more weeks once we’ve got some solid data to play with. It’s likely that we’ll probably have to tune the “offers” we’re giving users a bit more, but this is a good starting point. Either way, it’s been fun to dive in, overhaul this flow, and ship!
P.S. - If this stuff sounds like fun, we’re hiring!
