How Handy tries (desperately) to reduce churn
Recently, I decided to get my apartment cleaned. Living in SF, that usually means finding a startup that does it and getting a friend to refer you to get those delicious, delicious discounts.
I wasn’t ready to commit to a regular recurring clean just yet so I decided to cancel all future bookings.
This is a pretty awkward cancellation process. I have to check my inbox?
There’s no clear call-to-action (CTA) in this email. However, reading through it, cancelling the service is the last thing they want you to consider. I would really be interested in knowing the open/click rates on this email. In traditional user onboarding you want to widen the size of the funnel in each step. In the case of reducing churn, it’s the opposite, you want to squeeze the funnel tightly.
Ok, let’s see what happens when I try to “cancel” again.
Again, Handy tries to convince me to either reschedule or skip the upcoming bookings rather than cancel completely. There’s now two CTAs to choose from and yet another cancellation link.
Clicking on “No thanks” takes me to a feedback page.
There’s no way to skip providing feedback, clicking on other forces you type in a reason.
They’re getting desperate. I have to say though, I do love this page.
- The CTA is “Claim Cleaning” which made me stop to actually read what’s on the page. It piqued my interest “How do I get FREE cleans?!”
- On the feedback page I selected “I’m travelling” and on this page, the copy reflects my choice. I love the personalisation that they added to this page.
Clicking on “Claim Cleaning” left me disappointed as it took me to their booking page.
It has no mention of the free hour of cleaning. I’d like to guess that if anyone actually clicked “Claim Cleaning”, majority of them would just go back and cancel the service anyway. I expect no more than 5% of users to actually claim the free hour worth of cleaning.
So after clicking through 5 screens in order to cancel my service, I get presented with a net-promoter-score (NPS) survey which I bet the results are less than satisfying considering the user had to jump through 5 hoops just to cancel.
Having said that though, I do applaud Handy’s efforts in attempting to reduce churn. I bet the results are fascinating.
