> You don't get Bob's phone number on sign-up? Oh come on, that's a weak excuse. You have his name, email address, and Google. You an almost certainly locate most customers in this circumstance if you cared to.<p>I wouldn't mind at all if I received such communication via any means I had provided to a business, but I'd be fairly upset if Random Startup B - whose service I demoed for a month and ultimately decided against - suddenly called me on a number I never gave them after I had already decided not to do any further business with them.<p>An email asking for a phone number would be perfectly acceptable. It would positively affect my opinion of the company and could go some distance towards gaining me back as a customer, but calling me on a number I never gave would be a pretty significant final nail in that coffin.
There's no reason to limit your dunning to a single followup e-mail and 3 days to fix. If that goes out on a Friday, it's almost as bad as just cancelling the customer on the first billing failure.<p>With Improvely, I follow up and re-try the charge after 1 day, then 3 days after that, then 7 (with an e-mail each time about when the next attempt will be), which gives them almost two weeks. Enough people fix the problem after a few days that this retains a lot of subscriptions that nobody meant to cancel. Often it's just a matter of giving someone time to call their bank to tell them not to decline the charge -- with international customers especially, it's often the bank doing the blocking for fraud-prevention reasons.<p>Which brings up another thing -- if you can build an "inactive" flag into your app, that's 100% better for retention and recapturing past customers than deleting accounts. If someone accidentally lets their payment lapse and tries to log in to find their account no longer exists, and all the work they've put into setting up or configuring your service has to be redone, they're very likely to stay cancelled. If they log in show them a "welcome back, your account's still here, enter your payment info to reactivate immediately" screen.<p>As far as Patrick's advice for handling plan upgrades, I'd add one more tip: Build in some logic to never upgrade someone within X days of their billing date. Combined with the automatic warning at 80%/90% usage so they know they're getting close to needing to upgrade, making sure you never surprise them with a higher bill 2 days before their renewal goes a long way to keeping everyone happy. I've only ever had one customer reply to a mail about nearing the limits of his plan that he didn't want to upgrade and pay more, and he was completely happy after I offered a discount off the published cost.
1) I think that reminding people a month in advance that their credit card will expire next month is better than telling them the payment failed and giving them 3 days to fix it or lose service.<p>In fact, there's almost no reason you can't give them a week or two to pay since it's SaaS we're talking about. They may need time to get approvals, to get the new company CC number/expiry, etc. 3 days is super short.<p>2) I like the idea of picking customers who are near the upper limit of their plan, and pitching them a small incremental upgrade to a (not advertised) higher level plan.<p>So if someone is in the 90 rabbit range, they may be intentionally trying to say below their 100 limit. If you offered them a 200 limit for an extra $X a month, < than the next higher plan of 500 rabbits), they might bite and that would be free revenue.<p>3) What about ABC? Should you or could you pitch another product as part of the cancellation/update your cc emails? That is an important customer touchpoint and a time to remind them what else you sell.<p>4) What about offering a pause option? I've had companies (like Audible.com) who contact you when you attempt to cancel and ask if you would rather put your account on hold for a few months. Maybe what they need is more time to make a decision.
Good stuff, but:<p>I really don't want SAAS companies calling me to ask why I canceled. Email is great, thanks. Maybe it's different for larger customers, but if I get a random phone call from a company I pay <$100/month, I'll probably like you less.
Wow, what a great article! I have a few web applications to automate certain processes that I created for internal use at my corporation. Of course, there are no billing issues since it's for employee use only, but there are other issues like a PC is offline, or someone doesn't have access, etc.<p>I'm going to take this idea and every time there is an issue like the above, I will have the web app automatically email me AND the person. In this way, the conversation will get started automatically. This will help me to communicate with users and hopefully increase engagement.<p>If anyone has any other ideas on how to apply this to applications for internal company-use, please post!
If you are in the UK and you are billing monthly then I've had nothing but a good experience with these guys so far <a href="http://gocardless.com" rel="nofollow">http://gocardless.com</a> and of course DD's don't expire like a card does.
In India we have legislation which allows you to put your phone number on a 'Do Not Call' list. Telemarketers have to be registered with central authority and are not supposed to call people on the DNC list. The first violation (call, sms whatever) gets you a warning, and the second gets your telephone disconnected and hits you with a heavy fine.<p>I am delighted to report all unsolicited SMS es and calls, and get a kick out of "This telemarketer has been disconnected for unsolicited marketing" reports.<p>The system doesn't work uniformly well across the country yec, but it is getting better and spam SMS and call levels have come down to almost non existent levels, and any occasional calls are reported pronto. Anybody trying these tricks in India had better be prepared to get their telephone disconnected and pay some heavy fines.
Love it. I've been spending the last week on copy for transactional emails for an app.<p>But, like other's have said about the phone #... I think it's largely generational, but I won't sign up for a web app that requires my phone # unless I really really have no other options.
Having read through most of the site and being on the newsletter, I find the biggest problem with this being a focus on SaaS. Not that it is a bad thing, but when my business is selling Video Novel/Select Your Own Adventure software, it seems like so little of this applies. Just me?