Baby Please Don't Go - When Trying to Keep a Customer Goes Wrong
For a recent consulting project, I was asked to make an educational program based on a book that the client wrote. While discussing with a colleague how to engage students online, a colleague recommended trying animations as a way to increase the engagement and entertainment. He mentioned a product called Toonly, which allows you to make animations and voice overs without knowing any actual animation programs. Despite a few glitches and challenges in the user experience and program functionality (which admittedly caused me to resort to profanity and threats of violence toward my computer), it is a nice program. I got to create some nice animations on housing literacy and home ownership, which is not a topic I ever envisioned myself covering but learned a lot in the process.
Toonly operates on a subscription-based model. With the project about done, I no longer needed my subscription. You could say that I needed a break, a time out in our relationship. It wasn’t Toonly; it was me.
The problem came when I wanted to cancel my monthly payment. I actually just wanted to have the option to ‘suspend’ my account since I probably wanted to come back to it later for other projects. I just wanted a time-out, as you sometimes need in a relationship. However, when trying to navigate their procedures to suspend my account, I couldn’t find that option. Rather, the only option I had was to ‘cancel’. I guess our relationship had to be all-or-nothing
To give your customers the option to “cancel” in itself is an interesting word choice. To cancel would mean to cease to exist, to call off with some finality. On the other hand, to suspend would be to temporarily end the arrangement, put things on-hold with the potential (and even likelihood) to re-engage in the future. Even though I just wanted to suspend, but was only given the option to cancel.
To cancel, Toonly requests that you send an email message to their customer support. In my email, I indicated that I actually wanted to suspend my account. I was trying to keep our relationship alive in some way. Unfortunately, here is the response that I received:
Where to begin. Applying a conversation analysis lens, I used “suspend” in my first message to indicate the action I wanted to take. My framing was shifted by “Rachel,” the ‘Customer Experience Specialist’, to “you want to cancel your Toonly account!” Actually no I didn’t want “to cancel”. Rachel respecified changed what I said and put words in my email. This move was done as to fit my request with their categories. My desire to suspend was denied, with an exclamation point for extra emphasis!
Second, there is the sentiment that their goal is “to make sure our customers are successful.” That’s nice to hear, and I appreciate their commitment to my success. To help make me successful, they are willing to offer me the SAME SUBSCRIPTION at half off what I was paying previously. Thanks, I guess. I mean, it was a nice offer, but at the same time it was pretty insulting.
ACT NOW!!
Does this mean that when I was paying full price, they were not interested in me being successful? I ask since success here is linked to paying 50% less. I’m not sure what the price has to do with how dedicated they are to my success.
What does your message mean, Rachel!?!? Does it mean that I was being ripped off by paying twice as much as it is worth? Does it mean that I can be doubly as successful if I am paying half price? Are they desperate to keep me as a customer?
This exchange also made me think of relationships in which a partner doesn’t feel appreciated until threatening to leave. Baby, please don’t leave me. If you stay, I’ll be 50% less annoying. I’ll do twice as many dishes. I’ll double my nice quotient because I am willing to do whatever I can to make sure our relationship is successful!
It is not a sign of a healthy relationship where a person only feels appreciated upon threat of leaving. Where was this before?!?! Now I felt really jilted. Besides, I was just looking for a break in our relationship. Rachel had escalated it to breaking up. If that is the way you want it, Rachel (and Toonly). I just needed some space to figure some things out. I didn’t think it had to completely end this way.
Listening to your customers means listening to what they said, and responding based on that. I wanted to suspect; they talked about cancelling. They opted to use language that created a finality on ending the relationship
Make people feel valued before they leave. Making me feel ‘special’ when I am leaving makes me feel more devalued. I wasn’t asking to suspend as a negotiating tactic, so don’t turn it into one.
Give people options in terms of how they want to define their relationship with your company. If all you give me is all-or-nothing, then our relationship can only be binary. But relationships are much more complex than that. Have those options available even at different price points.
Remember the Peak-End Rule. My relationship with Toonly had its rocky moments where I had to fight with the program. I have a lot of positive feelings in terms of how our relationship grew, and what I was able to produce through it. However, I mostly now am remembering how it is ending. *Sadface*
Perhaps we will get to a better place with time. For now, we will have to part ways. I hope our experiences together will help them do better in their future relationships.
CODA
My response to my former partner did not go unanswered. I was hoping that we could talk thing out, come to some kind of mutual agreement. Alas, it was not to be:
Breaking up is hard to do.