A better cancel experience to engage and delight customers at Unbounce

Since 2009, Unbounce’s conversion intelligence has delivered its 120,000+ customers over 1.5 billion conversions through AI-engineered landing pages and copywriting solutions geared to stun and awe customers.

With scale and success, came the growth pains of managing churn and providing each customer with tailored experiences based on their use cases and conversion goals, ultimately helping the Vancouver-based company retain its reputation as the leading Landing Page & AI Copywriting platform.

To reduce cancellations and uncover valuable feedback hidden within their customer journey flywheel, Unbounce needed a robust tool that did more than analyze exit surveys.

Such a tool would also have to - beyond reimagining the cancel process and making critical business decisions more informed - provide critical and timely business intelligence to the Unbounce revenue team while enabling seamless data-sharing across all other departments.

With its ability to analyze and contextualize customer journeys across multiple stages and variables, and a penchant for fluid integrations, Chargebee Retention (formerly Brightback), ticked all the right boxes for Unbounce. This kicked off a new initiative to reimagine the cancel experience for their customers.

Reimagining a perfunctory cancel experience to deliver an immediate 11% churn deflection

Unbounce’s previous cancel experience consisted of a static exit survey that collected cancel reasons into an equally static database. Pulling engineers off product-related projects to change or test the exit survey was rarely a priority, and with no means to engage customers at the moment, the company couldn’t save customers before they left.

To start, Unbounce A/B tested Chargebee Retention against its existing cancel experience—half of their customers who wanted to cancel online went to the existing cancel survey and the other half went through the Chargebee Retention experience.

Chargebee Retention's value was validated right away and the company went on to implement an upgraded cancel experience with Chargebee Retention for all instances going forward.

“We ran Chargebee Retention side-by-side with our original cancel flow and learned right away that we could actually deflect cancellations without introducing friction,” said Max Tims, Unbounce’s (former) Director of Revenue Ops and Strategy. “Now we understand that when a customer hits cancel, they’re raising their hand for a lifeline. With Chargebee Retention, we’re able to deflect 11% of cancellations by being there for our customers when that hand goes up.”

Making offers more customer-centric through segmentation and needs-discovery

Instead of posing blanket offers for all canceling customers, Unbounce deployed more thoughtfulness and relevance at the cancel intent stage and made customers stick with the business.

First, Chargebee Retention mapped customer journeys to segment them into specific clusters based on account tenure, usage, and other variables. Then, it automatically presented contextualized offers to each customer and enabled the best teams to get involved based on unique individual needs.

For customers with a fairly new account (aged <90 days) presenting the option to book preliminary consultative sessions and hand-holding them to success proved the most effective. On the other hand, customers who have had an account for more than 90 days, were retained better by alerting the support team and ensuring the more technical questions were easily resolved.

Today, Unbounce segments customers based on early-stage and late-stage accounts while tracking offer performance across segments. It’s the opposite of a one-size-fits-all strategy, which stays true to Unbounce’s identity as a customer-centric organization.

Creating business impact without straining engineering bandwidth

Unbounce’s revised customer segmentation and retention strategy also help them identify and work on potential offer improvements immediately, and without needing engineer bandwidth.

First, the revenue organization tracks offer and segmentation performance and discovers opportunities for improvement. Then, they collaborate with customer and product marketing teams to iterate on offers and make changes immediately on Chargebee Retention. No engineers are required.

In the future, Unbounce plans to test segmentation by activation event instead of the age of the account, and it’s a test the revenue team can implement and track without competing against a product roadmap—a major win for a high-growth company like Unbounce.

Delivering better results with the same old tools

Unbounce placed Chargebee Retention right into its suite of tools already in use. Orchestrating workflows in Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack, Chargebee Retention works together with Unbounce’s customer experience stack to keep teams in the know about customer feedback and cancellations.

Chargebee Retention integrates with Unbounce’s Salesforce instance to keep all customer-facing teams on the same page. Data gathered in Chargebee Retention is exported to Salesforce where accounts are updated with new details about when a customer canceled and why. This helps the team have more context when speaking with previous or current customers.

Unbounce also uses Chargebee Retention with Zapier to help customer-facing teams respond to issues right away. When an Unbounce customer cancels for reasons related to billing or experience, a Zap triggers an alert in a dedicated Slack channel shared with support and success managers.

Armed with the reason for cancellation, additional customer feedback, and account details from Salesforce, team members at Unbounce can triage and engage with customers at critical moments.

Customer engagement is better with Chargebee Retention

Enabled by Chargebee Retention, these new retention workflows stand in stark contrast to Unbounce’s former exit survey and offboarding process, where data was stored outside of customer experience tools and far away from those eager to help customers.

Visibility into cancel reasons, the ability to segment insights by customer groups, and enacting new workflows for real-time engagement have had a major impact on Unbounce’s retention goals. And without creating more strain on internal engineering resources.

Today, this customer-focused organization is able to proactively help customers at the moment of cancellation, while also deflecting a double-digit amount of those cancellations.

“Before using Chargebee Retention, we couldn’t take action on data that our customers were giving us at such an important moment. Chargebee Retention has changed the way we operate,” said Max.