Subscription Box Answers

Can Chat To Cancel Lower Your Churn Rate?

• Liam Brennan

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In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I share something new we’re testing in BusterBox called Chat to Cancel. This is still in the very early stages, but I’m sharing what we’ve done so far and what we’ve learned.

Churn reduction should be a top priority for any subscription box business, and getting creative with your approach can make a big difference.

If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com and join the FREE Facebook group and post there.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. Hope you're having a great day. Box answers. Hope you're having a great day. On today's episode, we are continuing down the same path and I want to share something cool. We're testing at the minute to hopefully help us improve our churn rate. Obviously, on the last episode I was talking about a dunging tool called Stunging, which can potentially help you improve your passive churn, and a few episodes ago, just before Christmas, I released an episode called Retention on Call and that was all about what we're doing on the phone to improve our churn rate and to sell other products and stuff.

Speaker 2:

So, as you can probably tell, churn is a big priority in BusterBox in 2025. Churn is really important for any subscription business and especially when you get to a certain size. Churn makes such a difference to the overall profitability of your company and if you can even improve your churn rate by a percent or a couple of percent, it makes such a difference because that compounds over time and can seriously put your company in a much better position. You can earn more money, you don't have to spend as much on marketing to replace the people who have cancelled and you just end up with a much better subscription box business if you can find a way to get your churn rate down. So reducing churn obviously should be a big priority for any subscription box business, but it should especially be a priority for you if you're really scaling things up, because at a certain level it makes such a difference. So you should get creative and not be afraid to test different things. But anyway, I want to share what we're testing a difference, so you should get creative and not be afraid to test different things. But anyway, I want to share what we're testing, and this is called chat to cancel. Now it's very early days. It may work or it may do absolutely nothing, but you never know until you test. So here is my idea. Right, this was my idea. Around this, we have found that a lot of our cancelled customers can be saved and we've learned that from picking up the phone and speaking to people who are set to cancel and obviously going back and forth through email and stuff. A lot of the time we can save them.

Speaker 2:

There is normally solutions. If a dog destroys toys too quickly, we can upgrade them to tough chewer toys. If it's too expensive, they can take a break, or we can downgrade them to BusterBox Lite. If there's too much stuff, we can downgrade them to BusterBox Lite and we have solutions for a lot of our main churn drivers. There's also unique requests that come true because obviously certain dogs don't like certain kinds of products and some owners don't like their dogs getting certain types of products. So there's often unique requests that come true and we deal with these on a case by case basis when we have the opportunity to do so.

Speaker 2:

Now, over the years, from helping so many different subscription box companies in so many different niches, the same thing usually applies it doesn't matter if you don't have a dog box or a pet box. There's usually solutions you can offer to your customers to help reduce your main churn drivers. Now we obviously have a cancel saver and this definitely helps cancel saver and this definitely helps. But we have found with direct contact with customers you tend to save more people. But there's obviously a balancing act with that because if you have too much contact you can take up a lot of resources. So it's trying to find the right balance.

Speaker 2:

But anyway, with chat to cancel, my idea was when a customer logs in and they set their subscription to cancel, a chat will automatically pop up and it will say we're about to process your cancellation, but before you leave, can you just tell us the reason why? And it will connect them to a agent and the agent will then have the opportunity to save the customer. Okay, it would work pretty much like that. So we went to Subli with the idea and they liked it and they said they were happy to test it on the platform and we came up with a agreement and we paid for some engineering hours to get that solution added to the platform just so we could test it. Now the first version of it came out a few weeks ago and we've been using it in BusterBox. It's hooked up to our Sendesk chat and the really cool thing about it is we can turn it on and we can turn it off whenever we want. So we have an agent dedicating some of her day to testing this chat feature, but when she's not online, we simply go on and we turn it off and it goes back to the normal way of processing cancellations and we've seen some pretty good results with some of the chats that have come true.

Speaker 2:

But there are improvements that need to be made, because we're missing a lot of the chats because the way it's set up now with send desk, it means the customer has to write to us first and that's been lost in translation with some of the customers and they're not doing that and then they think the subscription is set to cancel and they don't bother proceeding with a chat and then we don't have the opportunity to actually save them. So we've gone back to subly. It's all a learning process to try to get this right. We've gone back to them and they're making some changes to it to hopefully improve that, because really the way we need it is when they go to cancel, it should just pop up fully on the screen and we have the opportunity to start writing to them immediately, and it's just really clear that they need to go through with this quick chat to actually make the cancellation happen. Now. Will this be worth it?

Speaker 2:

There's a few things to consider here. Number one it has to be really easy for the customer to cancel. We obviously have to have the opportunity to save them, but I definitely don't want to make it hard for the customer to cancel. I want this chat experience to be seamless and it has to be seamless where it's not a big inconvenience to the customer. It needs to be a simple chat that pops up on the screen and it's over with really, really quickly and we just have the opportunity to save them. But if they don't want to be saved, they can cancel.

Speaker 2:

The other thing is we have to build a case to see if this is financially worth it, because obviously we need to pay to have people on the chats, otherwise it's a complete waste of time. So we'll only learn this as the weeks go on. We have to see how many chats are coming through, how many we're saving. What is it costing to keep these agents on the phone and is the difference worth it compared to the process we've been running for the last few years? There's also scope there to sell other products to customers when they come true and to upgrade subscriptions. So yeah, there is still a lot of learning that needs to be done here to fully understand is it actually worth it? There is potential there, but who knows? I'll update you in the future when we figure these things out ourselves.

Speaker 2:

I just wanted to share that with you because, for me, I like when other business owners share what they're testing. It sparks ideas for myself and I enjoy when people are thinking outside the box to potentially improve something in their business. So, yeah, I just wanted to share that with you. I hope you enjoyed that and you got some value from it. Now we'll be back next week and can I ask you a big favor If you've been listening to this podcast for a while and you've got value from it, would you mind giving me a review on Spotify, apple or wherever you listen to this? It just helps me get the show out to more people. If you have a question you want answered, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post it there. I'll chat to you next week. Have a great day, bye-bye.