Validate and improve product-market fit

A well-designed cancellation flow can actually help attract the right customers to your business. 

It does this by tracking customer pain points and providing you with an ongoing, detailed summary of information that allows you to monitor the temperature of customers in order to understand what's wrong and why they might be leaving.

This will enable you to do two things:

• Implement continuous improvements to help prevent existing and future customers from wanting to enter the cancellation flow in the first place.
• Refine your marketing, sales, products and other customer touch points in order to make sure the people you're selling to are people who need your product or service. If your product doesn't solve their problem then they won't stay no matter what the incentive. 

Crucially, a system that's designed to gather and process this information will also make it easier for you and your team to absorb vast amounts of data and implement resolutions in a relatively hassle-free and much more accurate way than manual assessment.

Up- and cross-selling through cancellation flows

A carefully considered cancellation flow that's been designed with customer retention in mind might not only help you keep your customers, but actually increase their monthly spend with you as well.

When customers enter the cancellation flow, the opportunity to gather information is also an opportunity to upsell or cross sell. You may find that their reason for leaving is simply that they haven't got the right service from you or the right level of service. 

Alternatively, if customers want to discontinue because of a high price point, you can offer them a downgrade. If they are going to have a period of time when they don't need the service, then a pause option might be a good idea. They may actually find that one of those options solves an issue for them and is less hassle than canceling and rejoining. 

By understanding the customer better you create an opportunity to create highly personalized connections at critical moments in the customer journey. It's also a great way to gather information that can be used to help train team members and contribute to the ongoing improvement of your service.

Balancing automation and personalization

There's an irony in the idea that a highly technological process can help you connect with customers on a human level, but an automated cancellation flow is all about understanding your customers better, and giving them a greater sense of control and support. 

Sometimes the challenge is that they are not aware of how to maximize the benefits of your system, in which case it's a chance to provide learning support now or for future customers. If this is something you're able to provide, it can be a fantastic, low cost, high value way of engaging with customers, showing your level of support and meeting human needs.

By creating an exit survey that offers insights into the human experience about why they chose to cancel, then you can create the right message to improve your targeting as well as retargeting efforts to bring them back.

A cancellation flow should be created to constantly aggregate churn data into easy-to-ready reports. This provides you with multiple touch points so you understand how your business is working and how it can work better—both for you and your customers. Feedback might inform you about missing features, whether the pricing is right, whether there's an issue with the system functionality or it may give an insight into customers' overall product satisfaction.