💡 Overview

The cancellation flow is the process that customers go through to cancel a subscription or service. It typically involves several steps, such as requesting and confirming the cancellation and then providing feedback on why - but it can be improved.

Obviously, you want to minimise the number of customers cancelling their subscriptions so optimising the cancellation flow for your SaaS is essential as it can significantly impact customer retention and overall customer satisfaction.

At its most basic, the cancellation flow helps you gather customer data that you can use to reduce churn and improve customer retention. But if you optimise it properly you can also increase the chances they either stay or come back in the future.

⭐️ How to Optimize the Cancellation Flow?

Make cancelling easy

At first, you might think this is a bit backwards but how many times have you gone to cancel a subscription and it’s been super confusing and just downright annoying? How many times did you incorrectly cancel or assume you’d finished the process only to find a subscription charge on your credit card a few weeks later? And how did that make you feel about the company?

It’s not a good look if you make it hard for customers to cancel. It makes users less likely to resubscribe in the future as they’ve not only had a bad experience, they’ve lost trust in your brand. As a bonus, it can also lead to an increase in customer support tickets.

I’ve found gyms are insanely bad at this - I once cancelled a gym membership and they said I needed to give 14 days’ notice for the cancellation to go through and for it to be finalised. As I only gave them 13 days’ notice, I got charged for an extra month that I wasn’t able to use as I moved away from that area. I will never resubscribe for that gym.

Lesson? Simply put, make it easy to cancel and give the customer complete control over their subscription.

Provide clear instructions on how to cancel, and make the process as straightforward as possible. This can include options such as one-click cancellation, online cancellation forms, or even cancellation via email or chat.

Don’t do this:

Provide incentives to stay

In addition to making it easy to cancel, provide incentives for customers to stay. This can include discounts, special offers, or personalized recommendations based on their usage history.

Some options for incentives:

• Discount for X number of months

• Increased usage limits

• Offer done-for-you services

• Direct them to lower/higher plans that might suit their needs better

• Exclusive access to new features, higher-tiered features, etc

Alternatively, you can allow customers more flexibility such as pausing their subscription for a few months instead of cancelling.

Wherever possible, try and personalise the offers - for example, if you can see they’ve only used certain features, give them access to just these features for less.

You can also let customers choose between offers. If you’ve ever tried to cancel your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription you’d have experienced this.

Here’s a breakdown of Adobe’s cancellation flow for anyone interested.

Understand why customers cancel

When customers do cancel, it is essential to collect feedback on why they are cancelling. This feedback can help you identify common issues and areas for improvement. It can also provide insight into why customers may be leaving and what you can do to retain them.

Make sure you include an exit survey and try and keep it quick and simple to encourage more results - if someone is cancelling they don’t want to play a game of 21 questions.

Here are some tips for exit surveys.

📚 Resources

• This is a great breakdown of user cancellation flows with 6 examples

• 10 cancellation flow examples and why they work

• Bulletproof Your Retention Strategy with a Stronger Cancellation Flow

• What a proper offboarding cancellation flow should look like for a SaaS