The online cancel experience: A guide to building vs. Brightback
Brightback handles the heavy lifting when it comes to retaining your customers at the moment of cancel. This guide outlines how Brightback's platform compares to building a in-house tool to process, deflect and report on customers initiating cancellation.
Build your own vs. Brightback
| Build | Brightback | |
| Experience | A one size fits all cancel page that requires input from designers, engineering, and CX to finalize content updates. | Fully hosted dynamic cancel page branded to match style guides, fonts, colors and page URL. Can be tailored for cancels, downgrades, free trials, product lines and partners. The Brightback.js snippet renders the page with offers and loss aversion targeted to specific users. |
| Personalization | Minimal dynamic fields like “first name” or “plan name.” |
Dynamic field insertion pulls data from Brightback.js code snippet or mapped from Salesforce CRM. Page content, exit questions and offers are tailored to audience criteria. |
| Cancel reasons | Cancel data is typically captured via a static exit survey and stored in database or survey software. | Cancel reasons are tailored by flow (e.g. trial vs. customer) and are benchmarked across the Brightback platform. Cancel reasons appear in randomized ordering to eliminate sampling bias and can enrich third party systems via Segment or Zapier. |
| Integrations | Hardwired to process cancels and offers in subscription billing system. | Native integrations with subscription billing, CRM, Slack or email. We fit nicely with many of the tools in your stack to personalize the experience and trigger workflows around saving and winning back customers. Brightback webhooks enables flexibility to listen for and automatically trigger downstream billing, analytics or system updates. |
| Segmentation | Typically performed via offline analysis and not available to trigger, target or personalize real-time cancel experiences. | Customer data like cancel reason, LTV, product engagement, subscription tenure, billing term, or custom variables (persona, demographic, region, prior offer acceptance) powers Brightback's real-time testing and personalization capabilities. |
| Test & target | Cancel offers or experiences are not targeted or multiple offers may be provided in response to the user-selected reason for canceling. | Using Brightback multivariate testing methodology, offers and experiences are randomly tested to identify top performers against no-offer controls. Offers can be targeted, randomized or excluded, based on audience segment criteria. |
| Strategy | Retention approaches are developed over time by manual trial and error, which is documented in in-house knowledge management. | Brightback systematically tests retention tactics using the latest data science and machine learning techniques. In surfacing best practices across industries and use cases, we enable our customers to accelerate time to significant results. Our team recommends ways to tailor the cancel experience and offers in response to macro-economic or external events. |
| Reporting | Cancel data is analyzed periodically in spreadsheets or synced into a BI system. | Brightback's analytics and dashboards are Custom built for retention with save and offer performance, trends and save and cancel drill downs. All data is exportable via Segment or CSV download. |
| Revenue attribution | Determined by stitching customer ID lookups between product and billing in spreadsheets. | Customer saves are validated in the billing system and revenue data populated into dashboards—immediately demonstrating impact of retention tests on retained revenue. |
| Support | In-house support is typically bottlenecked by competing priorities. | After adding code snippet, all subsequent maintenance is handled by the Brightback operational admin. We're available 1:1 for data and strategy reviews, tactical tips or how-to’s. |
| ROI | Large internal effort to test and evolve a cancel flow that integrates with other engagement or product analytics tool. There are opportunity costs associated with taking resources from product and engineering projects. And leadership has low confidence that time investment will payoff without long-term, systematic approach to testing. | Save customers faster: After 1-2 weeks of implementation, Brightback starts deflecting cancellations and presents results in real-time. There's minimal to no engineering effort required for ongoing testing or management. And you can have high confidence in testing results. |
Still not sure? Check out our ROI calculator to see how Brightback buys itself back based on your business's cancelation volume: Calculate your ROI.
Over 20% of your customers don't really want to cancel
How did we come to that statistic? Real life customer data from high volume consumer subscription businesses! We see a regular pattern of our customers saving high percentages of their customers from canceling based on reasons like price, time, or customer experience issues (like service and delivery). Brightback helps to flag these cancel reasons and stops them in-the-moment by presenting rigorously tested and optimized Offers, like offering pauses or discounts, to ensure the most saved customers for your business.
Friction without hurting customer experience
Making it hard for your customers to cancel is not a retention strategy, and could even end up hurting you long term with winback efforts and word of mouth acquisition. Brightback offers the right amount of friction, collecting insights and feedback while still providing a great customer experience by presenting Offers and engagement opportunities your customers may not have been aware of.
Brightback customers that measured Brightback up against costly traditional call center and manual customer support efforts of retaining customers have seen dramatic lifts in average revenue per saved user up to 78%, up to 50% reduction on support handle time, with minimal difference between number of customers saved. With low-value customers routed automatically through Brightback, success and support teams can focus time and efforts on high-value customers, bringing more overall value to the business.
Think Brightback could be right for your business?
Talk to one of our churn and retention specialists to see how Brightback can help you with your business: Get a demo.