PROJECT
Reduced churn from 6% to 3% by implementing a two-phase cancellation flow with save options and a pause feature.
ROLE
Senior Product Designer
TLDR
Cancellations are a natural part of any subscription business. To manage this, we collaborated with our Ops team to consistently keep churn below 5%—significantly lower than the industry average of 6-8%.
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We implemented our cancellation flow in two phases. In Phase 1, we introduced a single 'save' option, offering customers a credit to retain their subscription. This adjustment reduced churn from 6% to 5%.
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In Phase 2, we expanded the save options with more personalized offers and added a subscription pause feature. This further reduced churn by 2% (down to 3%) and significantly decreased the volume of support tickets.
RESULTS
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Reduced churn rate by 3% (from 6% to 3%) through a two-phase cancellation flow implementation.
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Significantly decreased the volume of support tickets.
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Increased the lifetime value (LTV) of subscription customers by aligning them with products better suited to their needs.
Getting Started
Churn rate averaged 6%
Before this project, our cancellation experience was minimal—just a screen asking why customers wanted to cancel, followed by a confirmation page. There were few incentives or options to encourage customers to stay during the cancellation process.
This is the experience we started with
Taking a two phase approach
In collaboration with our customer success and ops teams, we adopted a two-phase approach to align this project with other high-priority releases.
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Phase 1: Introduced a single save option, offering a $5-$10 credit based on the product.
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Phase 2: Expanded the cancellation flow with downgrade options, tailored save offers based on cancellation reasons, and a subscription pause feature.
Phase 1
We refined our cancellation reasons using feedback tagged by our customer success team. Having more specific reasons in V1 enabled us to track trends and make informed adjustments for Phase 2.
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Based on these insights, we optimized the flow to strategically position the save offers.
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We were able to get churn down from 6% to 5% across the board between all of our subscription products.
Phase 2
With phase 2 we had a more ambitious task. We wanted to customize cancellation saves based on the reason. We narrowed the saves down to 4 different ways we could hopefully retain customers.
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Adjust Cadence (12, 6, and 4 books per year)
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Connect with customer support
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Turn on notifications
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Skip a billing period
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We released this and got a further 2% reduction in churn to 3% across our products.