For both B2C and B2B SaaS companies, the temptation often lies in prioritizing resources towards customer onboarding.
After all, the success and retention of customers typically hinge on effectively guiding new users to adopt the product and realize its value.
However, what about the SaaS offboarding process? Overlooking the importance of a seamless cancellation workflow, feedback collection system, or re-engagement sequence could mean missing out on crucial opportunities to mitigate churn.
A. Why is SaaS Customer Offboarding So Critical?
It’s easy to assume that when customers initiate the cancellation process, they’ve already made up their minds or are lost forever to your product.
Consequently, investing in SaaS offboarding and re-engagement efforts may appear futile. However, for most companies, there are compelling reasons to prioritize a robust offboarding experience.
1. Reducing Customer Churn
Merely because users commence the cancellation process doesn’t necessarily signify a definitive decision to sever ties. With an effective SaaS offboarding strategy, you may have the chance to retain users who are on the brink of churning.
Some may opt to stay immediately, while others might reconsider later, especially if your product evolves to better suit their needs. By facilitating a seamless offboarding process, you can minimize logo churn and potentially salvage valuable customer relationships.
2. Improving the Product
While some churn is inevitable, leveraging insights from SaaS offboarding interactions can inform product enhancements aimed at mitigating regrettable churn.
Engaging directly with departing customers during the SaaS offboarding flow offers a prime opportunity to gather feedback. Unfortunately, many companies overlook this step or fail to analyze and act upon the data collected.
Failing to leverage offboarding data as strategic input for product development is a missed opportunity. By tapping into firsthand insights from departing customers, you can specify areas for improvement and align your product roadmap accordingly.
3. Ending on a Positive Note
Even if you have a basic offboarding process in place, its efficacy may be marred by glitches or inefficiencies, potentially leaving departing customers frustrated.
Why bother investing in refining this workflow? Simply put, the peak-end rule suggests that the most emotionally intense moments—often occurring towards the end of an experience—leave a lasting impression.
By dedicating efforts to create a seamless and positive offboarding experience, you not only leave customers with a favorable final impression but also increase the likelihood of winning back lost customers and garnering referrals.
Tamer underscores the significance of a customer-centric offboarding process, highlighting that providing a pleasant departure experience can translate into satisfied customers who are more inclined to advocate for your software.
B. How to Enhance SaaS User Offboarding
Improving your cancellation and re-engagement workflow, or constructing one from scratch, requires adherence to best practices. Here’s how to do it effectively:
1. Simplify Account Cancellation
The process of canceling a SaaS subscription should ideally be straightforward, enabling customers to undertake it independently without resorting to extensive searches or scheduling calls with the company.
While exceptions may exist—for instance, removing a Chrome extension differs from canceling an enterprise product—the overarching principle remains: a convoluted cancellation process is more likely to repel customers than retain them.
Numerous SaaS companies complicate subscription cancellations, employing tactics like concealed cancellation buttons, prolonged phone calls, or burdensome forms, all aimed at dissuading customers from proceeding with the cancellation.
To counteract this, ensure that users can easily locate the cancellation option. Neuron Writer, for instance, prominently displays a “delete my account” button on its account dashboard.
If self-service cancellation isn’t feasible for your product, provide clear instructions on whom to contact to terminate subscriptions. Additionally, ensure your customer experience team is equipped to respond promptly to such requests.
2. Request Feedback
Whether the cancellation process initiates from your product dashboard, through email, or over the phone, seize the opportunity to ask for feedback.
You can adopt an open-ended approach, akin to GMass, inviting customers to share their thoughts freely. While this qualitative method encourages customers to express themselves, it may also lead some users to exit without providing feedback.
Alternatively, you can employ a structured survey approach, like Mailmodo, prompting customers to select from a list of reasons for their departure. This tactic tends to yield higher response rates and provides quantifiable data for analysis and action.
Chintan Parekh, Vice President of Customer Experience at Mailmodo, elaborates on their feedback strategy. He says that when a customer wants to cancel their service, the customer success team contacts them to find out why.
They asked if they could talk to us about it. If they wish to talk, they proceed to collect feedback during these talks and readily fix any problems we can right away to keep the customer. He goes on to say that if there’s nothing they can do, they pass their feedback on to the product team.
They also make sure customers know they can cancel even if they don’t want to talk, but Mailmodo just wants to learn how to make things better. This approach helps them get more feedback and reduces cancellations.
3. Offer a Targeted Incentive
In certain cases, you may have the opportunity to intervene mid-cancellation and retain the customer by offering incentives such as discounted subscriptions or temporary access to premium features.
Semrush employs a similar strategy, providing targeted offers to customers, citing cost as the reason for cancellation.
4. Highlight Lost Benefits
If incentives aren’t viable or don’t resonate with your customer base, emphasizing lost benefits or features can be equally effective.
For instance, LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s offboarding email showcases premium features, allowing customers to see what they’re missing and potentially opt to upgrade directly from the email.
Tamer, from Klujo, emphasizes the importance of personalization in offboarding messages. He says that Klujo’s offboarding process is very closely tied to its onboarding process.
The information they collect during onboarding gives great insights as to who the customer is and the value they are planning to achieve with their SaaS.
So, if they decide to churn, our offboarding messages are hyper-personalized to their industry as well as the challenges they are facing.
By making those messages relevant, they are less likely to churn and more open to having another discussion with them to cover the needs and challenges.
5. Downgrade to a Free Version
When faced with churned customers, opting to downgrade rather than outright deleting their accounts can be a strategic move, especially if your product offers a free plan.
Implement an automatic downgrade process that transitions churned customers’ accounts to the free version of your product. For instance, Bubbles, a screen recording tool, seamlessly switches accounts to the free plan after cancellation.
In their offboarding email, they include a comparison between the free and pro versions to highlight lost features.
6. Reengage Churned Customers
More than merely sending a confirmation message upon cancellation is required. To foster a positive customer experience and potentially reduce logo churn, consider re-engaging churned customers using personalized strategies:
a. Tailor Reengagement Sequences: Taskade customizes reengagement sequences based on insights gathered from offboarding surveys. John, from Taskade, explains, “We segment lost customers based on their reasons for leaving and send a thank-you email inviting them to remain part of our community.”
b. Highlight Product Changes: Showcase recent product updates or new features in your re-engagement efforts. Lavender’s re-engagement email, for example, lists several recently launched features and offers an enticing incentive to entice churned customers back.
c. Cross-sell Opportunities: Consider cross-selling relevant products or services to churned customers. Semrush’s re-engagement email, for instance, highlights one-off purchases that could be more appealing than a monthly subscription, particularly for users who canceled due to cost concerns.
7. Anticipate Churn and Respond Proactively
To truly improve your offboarding process, focus on preventing churn altogether. While this approach may not address non-regrettable churn, it can significantly impact regrettable churn. Here’s how:
a. Invest in Customer Success: Begin by prioritizing customer success from the onset, incorporating your customer success team during the onboarding process.
b. Identify Churn Signals: Monitor and identify early signs indicating a customer’s likelihood to churn. Once identified, respond promptly to support their success with your product.
8. Leveraging Customer Feedback to Enhance Your Product
Optimizing the offboarding process is just as crucial as streamlining onboarding and user engagement. While the primary aim of refining offboarding workflows is to mitigate churn, it’s equally important to harness the feedback collected during this process to improve your product.
Here’s how you can effectively utilize customer feedback to enhance your SaaS offering:
a. Tailoring Offboarding Workflows Based on Onboarding Inputs:
- Begin by leveraging insights gleaned during the onboarding phase. Understanding the user’s initial expectations, challenges, and goals can inform the offboarding process.
- Customizing offboarding workflows based on these insights can enhance the relevance and effectiveness of feedback collection during cancellation.
b. Prioritizing Feedback Implementation:
- Once feedback is collected during the offboarding process, prioritize its implementation. This involves categorizing feedback into actionable items, such as feature requests or bug reports.
- Prioritization should be guided by the alignment of feedback with the product roadmap and long-term business strategy.
c. Collaboration Across Teams for Improvement:
- Foster collaboration between cross-functional teams, particularly product marketing and development.
- Product marketing teams play a pivotal role in analyzing feedback to identify discrepancies between market messaging and product features.
- Development teams then assess the feasibility of implementing suggested features or addressing reported bugs, providing estimates for their execution.
d. Iterative Product Refinement:
- Implement a cycle of perpetual improvement based on customer feedback. The iterative approach ensures that the product evolves in order to meet and fulfill the ever-changing needs and expectations of users.
- Regularly revisit feedback collected from offboarding interactions to identify emerging patterns or recurring issues.
C. Summarizing Optimizing SaaS Offboarding
An effective cancellation and re-engagement workflow can positively impact various aspects, including user retention and product enhancements.
By implementing the best practices outlined above in this guide, you can establish a seamless customer offboarding experience, concluding the relationship positively.
This approach not only increases the possibility of winning back lost users but also facilitates potential connections with new ones through word-of-mouth referrals.
Suggested read: Winning the SEO Game: 8 SaaS Companies and Their Proven SEO Tactics
D. Common FAQs on Optimizing SaaS Offboarding
How can SaaS companies balance customer feedback with their product roadmap and business strategy?
SaaS companies should align customer feedback with their overarching product roadmap and business objectives. Prioritizing feedback items based on their impact on user satisfaction, market competitiveness, and strategic goals ensures that product enhancements are both customer-centric and aligned with the company’s long-term vision.
What are some common challenges faced by SaaS companies in leveraging customer feedback for product improvement?
Some common challenges include interpreting qualitative feedback effectively, managing a large volume of feedback data, aligning diverse stakeholder perspectives on prioritization, and maintaining agility in implementing changes while ensuring product stability and scalability.
How can the SaaS companies measure the impact of their customer feedback on product improvements?
SaaS companies can track key metrics like customer satisfaction scores, churn rates, user engagement metrics, and product adoption rates before and after implementing feedback-driven changes. These metrics provide quantifiable indicators of the impact of customer feedback on product performance and user satisfaction.
