How 12 big tech companies save millions of dollars with cancellation flows

There's a myth that we hear a lot from SaaS founders: "Once someone clicks the cancel button, they are gone. Cancelling customers aren't worth the time or effort. Focusing on growth is paramount."

Reality for most B2C/Prosumer SaaS's: about 25-55% of cancelling customers don't want to fully cancel and would stay if given the right incentive, presented in the right way.

Today, we're revealing some of the research that inspired Churnkey. While trying to reduce voluntary churn for our own B2C SaaS businesses, we scoured what other B2Cs were doing.

Turns out, a lot of the “Big Tech” companies were ahead of the curve of a lot of startups and SMBs in this area. So we documented dozens of cancel experiences—Adobe, Audible, GeForce, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and more—reverse-engineered them, and baked what we learned into Churnkey.

This post contains a ton of examples, additional data, and other ideas around improving your cancellation flow:

👉 How 12 Big Tech Companies Save Millions of Dollars With Cancellation Flows

Want a TL;DR? Here are some highlights:

Cancellation Insight Surveys

More than half of all the cancellation flows we researched included prominent “why are you leaving?” surveys. The best ones we experienced were short, easy to scan, and had large tap/click areas. Typically, these flows collect feedback at the beginning of the cancel experience, since it provides both essential feedback and enables more targeted recovery attempts to be made.

Presenting Effective Offers

There are three buckets we’ve seen when it comes to offers:

• Push customers to switch to a different, cheaper plan.
• Subscription “extensions” or free pauses.
• Discounted plans or arrangements that present the customer with a “well, why wouldn’t I take this?” decision point.

Double Confirmation for Offers and Cancellation

It’s simple, but asking the customer to confirm that they really, really want to proceed with cancelling their account can be a powerful moment. In our data, we see a significant percentage of sessions where a customer backtracks from the cancellation point so they can accept a previously-presented offer.

Surprising Tactics We Found

• Subscription bundling
• Paid pauses
• Offer bundling

There are a lot more examples, additional data, and other ideas around improving your cancellation flow in the post: https://churnkey.co/blog/how-12-huge-companies-save-millions-of-dollars-from-cancellation-flows