It is difficult it is to cancel a newspaper subscription, hence increasingly people choose to sign up via Apple Store.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them
Ernest Hemingway, as reference in this earlier post
If the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them, then why do so many businesses indulge in practices based on NOT trusting customers, practices that damage relationships?
“we’ve always done it this way”
my “six most dangerous words in business.
Perhaps they simply got stuck in a fixed mindset, back from somewhere in the bad old days of sales training, when the rough idea was to treat customers like idiots and force as much money as possible out of them over time. If you treat your customers like they may leave you at any time, like they may take advantage of generous returns or refunds policies etc etc, then you create ridiculously tight policies that greatly damage the customer’s trust in you!
Let’s look at some (bad and good) examples and then consider how to innovate (and remember, my definition of innovation is “simply doing things differently and doing different things”), see how, by changing your approach, you can instead build a happier, more loyal base of customers, to their benefit and that of your business!
Today’s post comes from being reminded of such bad practices by DHH ranting the other day on Twitter about how difficult it is to cancel a newspaper subscription, hence increasingly people choose to sign up via Apple Store, even though those media houses pay up to 30% of the revenue to Apple (a pet peeve of DHH, to be fair):
I replied:
Totally agree @dhh . In contrast @Beer52HQ makes it super easy to cancel online…which I did once…later to sign up again and also CONSTANTLY recommend them, partly due to that great customer service.
Beer52 are an Edinburgh based (sorry, the Scot in me had to note that!) craft beer subscription service where you sign up for monthly boxes of selected beers. A while ago I felt to cancel my subscription and found it really refreshing how easy they made it. I later signed back up, then, after a while, took a “holiday” from monthly boxes for a while. Again, super-easy, whether directly online or via their very responsive customer service options. For clarity, never a need to make a phone call. I have recommended them to several friends, at least in part as they treat customers well when they wish to change.
I totally agree, however, with DHH on newspapers. Among my subscriptions are the FT, Times, NY Times, Guardian, all of whom make you phone up to cancel or change, then even then make it really difficult.
A couple of other UK-centric examples of such bad practice are:
- Car Insurance – despite having online accounts for some changes, they still force an “auto-renew” option on you, when it would be SO easy to simply give you the option to “unselect” autorenew
- Mobile phone (cellular) contracts – similarly, they auto-renew your contract and always put it up by the rate of inflation (at least). In addition, you walk past their stores and constantly see offers, but they won’t let you sign up for them until your contact is up for renewal, when surely it would make sense to sign you up and simply extend your contract?
Car insurance and mobile phones are two examples from the UK, but there are many more. UK consumers basically have to make diary notes for all their annual subscriptions to then phone their providers a few weeks ahead of renewal date the go through an often deliberately cumbersome phone cancellation or renewal process to make sure they get the best rate.
To me this is quite nuts, as well as a colossal waste of time for all concerned. For over two decades a core of my career was around what can broadly be termed hospitality, where customer service is deeply ingrained, as well as certain core principles, one of them being that it is far, far easier to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Add to that principle the one that bad news travels 20 times faster than good news (yup, many studies back up that stunning stat!) and in hospitality we always focussed on our existing customers first… and it works!
I guess it is partly due to having decades of experience that makes me shake my head at how so many large organisations can get this so badly wrong 😉
To close, there are different ways of doing things. The bacon roll in the photo above comes from a blog around three weeks ago where I went to buy said bacon roll at an independent food truck and their contactless reader wasn’t working. The owner/operator simply said, straight away. “look after me next time”. Yesterday I did make a drive specifically to visit him at “On a Roll” and pay him for that bacon roll, plus buy another one and a generous tip!
So, treat your customers well, trust them, give them choices. Treat them well and they will repay you with loyalty, with referrals, by spreading the good news!