Chargebee Retention offers different Use Cases, like for downgrades and expired trials. It not only helps to save customers and get insights from those who cancel, but also helps with overall compression and conversion. Acquisition issues often moonlight as churn, as the reasons customers leave are often the same reasons they fail to buy in the first place.
Got a few different plans or pricing options for your customers to choose from? Use a Chargebee Retention Page! We have a few tips for expanding Chargebee Retention to your Downgrade Use Case.
Different Loss Aversion Cards can be more effective and make more sense for the Downgrade Use Case. Here's some tips on how to make your Loss Aversion Cards more Downgrade friendly.
Show customers the great features they will lose when they downgrade that aren't on the lower priced plan. It's possible they are using and getting value out of at least one of the features and didn't realize it would be gone when they downgrade.
Often times customers downgrade because they don't see the value of the additional features. Use an Offer in the Loss Aversion Cards to Offer a free training session to show them the value over a screen share, or present a video tour of the feature benefits.
The Reasons customers downgrade don't typically match the Reasons customers cancel. Capture these nuances by using different Reasons in your Exit Survey.
You should always have an opportunity for a customer to voice concerns with your customer experience: support or success, but is especially true if your higher tiered plans offer Premium Support as a feature.
"It's too expensive for the value" is a popular reason customers downgrade. Keep them around momentarily with a discount, and let that signal to your customer success teams those customers could benefit from a little extra TLC to learning how the features on the plan could work for them.
Out of budget is a different pricing related Reason than value, and therefore should be measured and treated differently. If these customers find value but don't quite have the funds, you can help them out with a discount, ala carte add-ons, or alerting them of savings from annual payments.
Measuring how frequently customers downgrade from not using features could cue your team to up your enablement, success, and customer marketing efforts. Make sure your customers know the value of all the features on their new plan!
Similar to Loss Aversion Cards, the Offers you present should reflect Offers relevant to downgrades. Below are some popular examples among Chargebee Retention customers.
Sometimes folks downgrade because they just don't know how to use some of the features on their plan. Offer free coaching sessions to ensure your customers get the most value out of their plan.
If it's a customer support issue, give customers a chance to connect! There's often no better value than simply listening to your customers, regardless of if they cancel or downgrade.
Meet your customer halfway! Discounts are always a popular way to keep a customer around, and keeping them on a higher tier plan is no exception. Maybe they don't find it worth the full price point, but still believe it's valuable enough to pay a little more for the extra features.
Have any of your Plan features available ala carte? If a large number of your customers choose to upgrade only because one or two features, it's harder to justify the higher price point. Offer ala carte add-ons for particular cases where customers only want one feature on a higher tier plan. You can Offer to turn this one feature on for an "add-on" price, and still keep some extra revenue coming in, and making the customer happy as well.
There are two ways to handle trials for subscription:
How you implement Chargebee Retention will depend on which strategy you use for trial signups, so head to the correct section based on your current strategy!
Credit Card trials are easy to incorporate Chargebee Retention! If your customer presses "Cancel" while on free trial, we can redirect them to a Chargebee Retention Page the same way we would for a cancel.
Trials that don't take a credit card during sign-up don't get the most benefit from using Chargebee Retention on trials, since there's not a hard "cancel" button the customer needs to press, but it is still possible! Here's a couple ideas:
It's no secret that locking a card with a credit card capture can drastically decrease your trial sign ups. Keep your sign up easy breezy by locking extensions with Credit Cards. By then, folks are bought in, but will still need to cancel to end their trial.
While email Exit Surveys aren't nearly as effective as ones presented in app (only 2% of customers typically fill them out!) if you're getting value from Chargebee Retention in other ways, adding this to your Chargebee Retention buffet can only help, and still can reduce labor on support, provide insights, and keep a few more trials active to boot!
When someone is just getting started, they may not have had a chance to explore or think things through! Use Loss Aversion cards to deliver the important stuff, any extra information they may have easily missed along the way.
Nothing helps tip the confidence scales in your favor than a little social proof! Show your customers how great customers (just like them!) get value out of your product with links to Tweets from happy customers or case studies.
Maybe your customer just didn't find what they were looking for! Show them around the place with a Product Tour using our Video Loss Aversion Card.
Offer cards work really well as Loss Aversion Cards, and using them to keep trials hooked is no exception. Use Offers to suggest setup help, trial extensions, or time-limited discounts.
Trial survey options don't need to vary too greatly from the Reasons people Cancel, but there are still some things you'll definitely want to ask.
While customers can leave at any part of their journey based on needing features, this survey reason is never more true than it is in trials. Be sure to collect what customer's dealbreaker features are, the ones that keep them from buying your tool, to inform roadmap if it makes sense for the scope of your product, or assess the market you're reaching with marketing if it doesn't.
The number one saveable reason we see for why customers cancel is a failure to get properly onboarded in the first place. Tracking this will help you extend a helping hand to get folks back on the right track.
Especially helpful when you do pricing experiments, monitoring Price as a survey option can signal when you've gone too far while testing. You'll always likely have a steady percentage of folks failing to adopt based on price, and that's normal! Seeing spikes is where you'll want to assess and adjust.
Customers can leave you for a competitor at any time. For existing customers it may mean they have scaled out of your product, or their needs have changed. Tracking who you're losing evaluators to can indicate who your stiffest competition is for making a claim to your market.
This is a big one for trials (and an easy group to win over). Find out whose interest is still in the game, but may not have the bandwidth, and help them find their way.
Your Trial Offer strategy is less about winning them back, and more about making it easy for them to stay. Getting them training and more time on trial can work wonders without giving away discounts.
Sometimes, all you need is a little more time. Getting caught up in a whirlwind of tasks can prevent folks from truly testing out your product or service. Give them a little more time to figure it out, especially if they haven't even gotten started yet.
It would be nice if all of our customers were DIY geniuses that could figure anything out on their own, but that's simply not the case. If they can't get started themselves, guide them through by offering a helping hand. It may be all they need to stick around.
If your customers leave due to missing features, there's likely not much you can do to keep them around. You can learn what's the dealbreaker, though! Prompt our Email Offer to collect feedback on what their missing and send that email to your support or success teams. If it's something you have, you can reach out (or use their contact to win them back when the feature is released!)