A tale of two SaaS subscriptions
So, story time!
Last year, on the 4th of October, I had purchased annual subscriptions of two fintech sites. Their software allow users to research various investment options, to (hopefully) make an informed decision. One of them covers global markets while the other only covers a national market.
(Image generated via Imagen 2, through Google Gemini.)
As so happens with such subscriptions, I used them rather regularly for the initial few weeks and then, irregularly as time went by.
Recently, I decided to cancel all such, unused or rarely-used, subscriptions. So, I logged in last month to do so. To their credit, both sites made it very easy to cancel the subscriptions.
It was interesting to see what happened afterwards.
The customer success team of the international site sent an email asking if there's anything they could do to get me to continue the subscription. They offered to explain how best to use the various features, etc. They even offered a decent discount to make it easy for me to continue.
The national site, on the other hand, seemed to have just accepted my decision. They never followed-up to see if they could do anything.
These experiences raised the following questions in my mind:
Did the two sites ever track the adoption of their solutions / services by the customer, i.e., me? If they did, they would've found out early enough that I'm not fully and properly using their offerings.
Why did the customer service folks at the international site wake up only after I had decided not to renew my subscription? The folks at the national site didn't even bother to offer such a courtesy.
Now, it is totally possible that I, being a small fry, am not really of any significant interest to them. Or, they were simply respecting my decision. And, that's why I experienced what I did. However, I am still curious.
Did they not have any systems and processes to track metrics such as adoption, feature usage, etc.?
Why didn't they have a more, active, on-boarding process for new customers?
As a sales professional who has sold CRM solutions, I do know that most modern SaaS applications can track the adoption and usage, generate regular reports and always-updated dashboards for these metrics, and even push them out to the concerned person(s) / team(s).
So, what's the moral of the story? Well, there are two.
Inspite of the focus on digital transformation, there are still organizations that seem to stumble on the more mundane, automation, tasks.
Having the right kind of automated solutions are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a great customer experience (CX). People continue to remain critical.
For me, it's still a happy ending as I managed to save some money.
PS: I have, intentionally, not named the sites as it is not my intention to flame them. Their solutions continue to be useful and I'm sure they have many more, very happy, customers.