The Impact of Customer Feedback on Subscription Management

Running a successful subscription business means creating an effective subscription management strategy which aims at identifying and eliminating customer cancellations.

Collecting and, more importantly, utilizing customer feedback is one of the keys to a successful subscription management strategy helping you identify and align your product to your customers’ needs.

Here’s how customer feedback can help you avoid common subscription management mistakes and overcome any subsequent challenges:

Understand and Eliminate the Reasons for Canceling

Churn is inevitable but knowing why it happens is key to increasing your customer retention rates.

Listening to your customers’ feedback is the best way to understand why they are leaving.

Is your product more expensive than that of a competitor? Do your customers fail to take the full advantage of your platform? Do they fail to see the value in using your product? Are they facing any other challenges?

Collecting your customers feedback is how you identify and eliminate these critical issues your existing customers may be facing.

PayKickstart’s “Cancellation Saver” feature will prompt your customers to submit the cancellation reason after they requested to stop or refund their payments.

By adding a simple feature like this, you can make more informed usability and product development decisions in the future. If the most common issue for canceling turns out to be pricing, you can address your pricing strategy. 

If most of your canceling customers claim that your product is too difficult to figure out, it is time to hire a user experience expert. If your leaving customers claim they are not using your platform, it is a good sign you need to re-engage your inactive customers more effectively.

Obviously, don’t just tackle the most common reason. Any of these identified issues should be addressed.

A failure to meet your customers’ expectation is often #1 reason why subscription customers leave. So onboarding is an important method to decrease churn. 

When on-boarding your customers, make sure to start collecting their feedback right away. Understanding how new customers engage with your product is essential to adapting your platform to meet their needs better.

Lower the Number of Quiet or Inactive Subscribers

They say, quiet customers are your best customers because they are not using your company’s resources.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Quiet customers are more likely to become inactive without you ever realizing the reason for their inactivity. And this is a good way to face an increased number of refund requests.

Unless you talk to your customers on a regular basis, you wouldn’t know why they tend to stop using your product after a certain period of time and become inactive.

Inactivity is one of the most common and complicated challenges a subscription business tends to deal with. Creating effective workflows to collect feedback on different stages of a customer’s journey helps you re-engage inactive users and learn to solve the reasons for their inactivity. 

Identify How Customer Experience Can Be Improved

Providing a good customer experience is vital to ongoing success in selling via subscriptions.

Customer experience consists of multiple elements, including people using your site or app, interactions with your customer support or social media teams (especially if you are selling on third-party platforms, like Facebook Marketplace), reading your emails or seeing your ads, etc. Generally speaking, any touchpoint with your business is part of customer experience.

As it comprises so many elements, customer experience is not that easy to analyze and improve. And yet, poor customer experience is often the reason for failing to complete a buying journey.

Improving your customer experience is also an ongoing effort for at least two reasons:

• The web is changing fast bringing new technology and influencing your customer’s expectations
• Your customers’ needs and challenges evolve with time (based on how long they have been using your platform or depending on new solutions and competitors emerging in your market

Creating contextual and action-oriented feedback forms will help you collect feedback without interfering with your customers’ journeys or distracting them.

For contextual feedback forms, try solutions like Startquestion which utilize AI to create user flows that will adapt survey questions based on the current page content:

For action-oriented feedback solutions, use Paykickstart’s built-in functionality “Customer Surveys” that allows you to set up surveys based on a particular action, e.g. after cancellation, after refund request, after showing up at your event, etc. These surveys are well-timed, and hence trigger a better response.

You can also embed surveys on your blog using one of these surveying plugins.

Help Your Customers Feel More Invested into Your Product

Finally, inviting your subscribers to share their feedback will help them feel more invested with your business, especially if they know that their feedback is taken seriously and implemented into the product. You can further research what is a softphone if you want to improve the communication between you and the customer, as well as inside the organization.

Collecting feedback helps build brand loyalty which, in turn, results in many other great results, like stronger online reputation, product recognizability and more referrals through word of mouth. And more importantly, brand loyalty results in longer customer lifetime and lower churn (which are both key for a successful subscription management strategy).

It also allows you to identify your most active and happy customers to engage them further in sharing their positive reviews online in exchange for discounts or free products. With time, if you do customer relationship management right, these active customers will likely become your brand advocates. It is also a good idea to publicize that social proof you are collecting by sharing it on your multiple channels. You can consolidate these efforts by using a link in bio tool.

Conclusion

Customer feedback plays a significant role in improving subscription management. By actively listening to customer opinions, brands can gain valuable insights into their subscribers’ needs and pain points. This feedback helps companies refine their products, improve customer experiences, and ultimately increase customer retention.

Curious about PayKickstart and the only Platform that Combines Subscriptions, Retention, and Affiliate Management all in one place?

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Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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