Baremetrics’ Josh Pigford makes good points here about business self-preservation and customer service:
If prior months’ trend were any indication, in a matter of months we’d be hemorrhaging customers at a rate that would have put us out of business. Something needed to change. […] We removed the ability to cancel directly in the app. You’d need to message us if you wanted to close your account. […]
For a solid year, the feedback from manual cancellations continued to be quite actionable and we could count on one hand the number of people who responded negatively to the process. We cut our churn in half during this period thanks directly to the feedback we received. And more importantly, this literally saved Baremetrics.
The customers you do keep are ultimately the most important constituency to your business because they pay the bills. It doesn’t help them that you made it so easy for others to leave that the whole business became compromised. We I ran Defense Industry Daily we used manual cancellations for pretty much the same reasons and in the same professional way as Josh described. We learned a lot, made it quick and painless for customers, and saved some subs too.