Two examples of customer delight that shows genuine care is a good strategy
Have you ever been delighted by a product experience so much that you could not stop sharing with the world? Well it happened to me sometime back within the same week and I thought I must share to the world as well.
Case 1:
A few weeks ago, I had signed up for a Pricing Strategy course at Coursera for a 7-day free trial by sharing my credit card details. As it happens in most cases, I forgot to cancel on the 7th day in spite of setting reminders. Just when I received the transaction notification on my phone, I wrote to their support immediately asking for a refund as I had not intended to take the paid course.
Within three hours I received a reply in the negative. They stated that since the transaction has happened after the 7 day trial period, they wont be able to refund me.
I argued and insisted to speak to a higher authority in Support and after a couple of email exchanges, they offered the refund as a one-time exception for me.
I was relieved. But the experience left a bad taste in me.
Case 2:
Similar to Coursera, I also took a 14 day trial subscription with Canva to try some of their video features that were not part of their free offerings.
And voila, I forgot about cancelling it again. However, on the 23rd day of the free trial, an email subject line from Canva grabbed my attention. It said:
“Reminder: Your Canva Pro subscription is about to begin”
Here are some of the emotions and thoughts I felt reading the email:
A surge of relief (Wooah!).
A priceless sense of appreciation that left a high positive lifelong brand perception for Canva .
Admiration towards Canva that bordered on love.
What are the insights to gather from this experience?
Hordes of companies world over make a lot of money from forgetful customers. In one of my previous organizations, we also called a cohort of customers as sleeping customers. These were customers who were paying subscription for the product but were not active. Some trial period experiences are deliberately made to hook you into subscription even when it is unintentional. Chargebee has a great analysis on free trial with/without credit card.
An unwitting customer makes your revenue numbers look good but it is bad business in the long run. It leaves a bad taste and bitterness in the minds of the user who never intended to buy your product but is forcibly locked in. He would not be an engaged customer and no amount of campaigns and messaging to him in the future would work because his focus is on exiting from the contract.
What Canva has done here is set the bar on trial period experience in the industry. They are aware of a prevalent problem that many customers forget to cancel on time and are trapped into being paid customers. And they took the onus onto themselves to help them and provide them a timely reminder.
The first company that takes up a radically different stance to the existing norms sets the standard for the rest of the industry and by being the flag bearer for change, it benefits for a long time.
What existing industry norms are you willing to change and be a champion of?
Case 3:
The second example of customer delight comes from my favourite people at Basecamp and founders of Hey.com.
Hey.com solves the pain of traditional free email service by giving you more control on what goes in your inbox. They grabbed a lot of eyeballs with their product offering and benefited from a massive PR when they took on Apple for their Appstore rights.
Hey.com ran a campaign that offered two things:
Its users could keep the email ids forever even if they choose to leave after a years’ subscription.
Set up a forward from the Hey address to any other email address forever.
This flies in the face of conventional wisdom.
Conventional wisdom would say that the fear of losing their email ids would lock the users for a much longer time.
But they chose to keep a radically different stance here.
I had a similar experience from folks at Soundcloud that had resulted in a lot of heartburn earlier.
I was a regular podcaster and I published my audio content for product management regularly on Soundcloud. However, after a 100 episodes, I took a logical break for a year. I stopped the subscription because I wasn’t actively publishing content. But to my surprise, Soundcloud would unpublish all my content of over 100 episodes. They forced me to keep paying my subscription even if I wasnt publishing new content just for storage of a few MBs of space. This was outrageous.
But they later changed that policy for the better. And I am happy and the bad taste I had for Soundcloud has changed.
And most platform providers are now proactively offering assurance for a way out without enforcing lock-in forever.
What are the insights to gather from this experience?
As PMs, customer lock-in is a tactic is something that we are programmed with through experience and education.
While lock-in helps you increase customer lifetime, giving the customers an easy way out is increasingly becoming a deal breaker. Customers are demanding a clarification for the way out in the future if ever they would want to quit. It’s like a prenuptial agreement before the marriage. The best strategy is to proactively offer it before the customer demands for it.
Genuine customer care is always a great strategy in the long run.