These are the most dreaded emails but also are often the most untrue. The person actually doesn’t want to cancel, they are usually having an issue and the resolution is really what is wanted.
When a customer fires a break up email, you have two options. You can just accept it and move on or you can double down and attempt a repair. The biggest obstacle though is that once someone has hit the “cancel” button their attention is no longer on the problem and instead on getting away.
This is where everything starts to go wrong.
The customer is now distracted and likely cancelling isn’t a walk in the park. For example, when someone wants to leave us, it is a 2-6 month decision, you can’t flip a switch. This is pretty typical in technology, but also true throughout most industries. When I was in retail we couldn’t easily fire a vendor and move to a new one, it was an orchestrated project.
We never really wanted to fire them, we just wanted them to provide the best possible service to us. You really just want what you expected, and that is not at all unreasonable.
This is where a great support and account management team is your friend, not your foe. They live and breathe to take care of problems and each and every customer. I don’t think that someone who calls themselves “Support” can be unwilling to support the customer and get things done for them.
But when the customer is all worked up, they feel that nothing they say is heard. This is the spin cycle. The solution might be right there, but hearing it is impossible. They just repeat “I want to cancel.”
We saw this with a client last year. They reached out to us extremely upset and wanted to cancel. We had the solution to their problem but they didn’t want to hear it. They still wanted to cancel. So we canceled them. Months later they came back and asked if we had solved their problem. They wanted to return.
Yes, we solved it. We solved it before they canceled but it was the “just cancel me” spin cycle and unwilling to listen.
So before you get to the point that you hit that cancel button, make sure you are ready because it is not an easy journey. Once you are distracted you likely are doing more damage to the business than good for it. You really don’t want to leave. You want what you paid for. Nothing more, nothing less.
If any customer of Searchspring is reading this and has their finger hovering over the cancel button, hit reply and let me help you avoid that damaging spin cycle. It’s not good for your business or ours.
