Acquiring customers has always been an expensive process. Offering new and better products (hopefully the same) to an existing customer base should be a no brainer. This should involve attention to detail, but not everyone does that, which customers can notice right away.

Like many, we use several products and services that are subscription based, and in fact we offer a few of our own. Sometimes the renewal notices come with a discount, one way to reward, as well as reinforce, loyalty. This is easy to do and lends itself to automation, triggering email notifications from database queries and prepping the eCommerce handler.

Not surprisingly, this requires coordination between the offer proper and the eCommerce system, with both ‘knowing’ about the customer. Lacking this, customers trying to take advantage of the offer will instead be alienated when the offer is taken away. At the very least, this lack tells the customer very directly that they are not really appreciated beyond being a revenue source.

A recent email renewal notice certainly knew about the installation, including the serial number, and had a nice discount if renewed by a certain date. The link in the email went to the new purchase web page, losing or ignoring our information, as well as nothing about the discount. Trying to find a renewal discount page was frustrating enough, but it did not know about the serial number taken from both the renewal email and the product itself, and repeatedly went to the new purchase page.

It only took two times around this designed futility to come to several conclusions. The first was that maybe, just maybe their software isn’t really that good given how renewals are mishandled. The second was the realization that their QA doesn’t exist. And the third was that all of this just wasn’t worth the hassle – it was literally easier to uninstall their software, find a competitor’s product and install it.

One more lesson: We reexamined our renewal process to make sure that all the dots are connected. Perfection only exists in Heaven, or at least beyond human capabilities, and we did find a couple of places that could be, and were, tightened up.

© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG

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Tags: client retention, customer loyalty, database marketing, software renewals, subscription software

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 0:50 and is filed under Software That Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.