Just Say NO To Multiple Are You Sure You Want To Cancel Subscription Pages

First cancel screen looks like this

Notice the tiny font for “I want to cancel” but we need to click that.

It’s a budgeting decision (not really, but that’s the best choice besides “other…” I guess)

We’re not done yet. No.

We’ll give you a FREE month if you just stay active

A nice gesture to give us a FREE month to stay with them and maybe I should have stopped here — as I’m sure some do — but that option banks on the subscriber not choosing to cancel in the free month, I’m guessing.

Went ahead and clicked “No thanks, finish my cancellation.” Will this be the final confirmation?

As you can see from the screen above, today I canceled our Shudder streaming subscription. It’s all good, am not upset at the service or anything, and I’ll be back resubscribed with the service later this year. Probably sooner if they bring in the second season of Creepshow (loved that show). Shudder isn’t the only streaming channel that does this when you try to cancel.

Will get back to this excess cancellation verification stuff in a bit, first what streaming channels are we still subscribed to?

I still very much enjoy horror, but over the next few months I’m planning to watch some other channels more and there are horror movies on other subscribed channels. Next month I will try watching more CBS All Access, which I subscribed for the new Star Trek: Picard show, among others on that channel. In May, HBO Max is coming and fairly certain we’ll be checking that out, too.

Streaming channel subscriptions

As of 1/22/2020 here are our streaming movie/TV subscriptions (in no particular order):

• Amazon Prime Video – annual until March 2020, will renew
• Netflix – monthly
• Disney+ – annual until November 2020
• STARZ – monthly for $0.99/month deal for one more month, then canceling
• DC Universe – monthly
• Shudder – monthly, just canceled but available until 1/26/2020

Something new comes in, something else goes out. Nature of the streaming household cord cutting world. I would like to think other households are doing the same. Pay for the channels you are most actively watching, cancel the others and come back.

Excess cancellation verification pages leave customers with negative exit experience

When a customer leaves your business, some sort of retention policy is good business. At the same time, you don’t want to make the process too unwieldy lest the customer leaves with a negative exit experience.

Something I noticed that kind of annoyed me was how many “are you sure you want to cancel” pages were there. I remember Hulu having a similar membership retention process when I canceled that recently.

I would gently suggest to companies that they make it easier to just cancel outright. One additional verification page isn’t obnoxious. Two or more? Um, yeah.

Amazon is one of the biggest companies out there and they don’t do any of this with their added channels. They might have a super aggressive retention procedure when you cancel Amazon Prime (haven’t tried that yet). Not sure about Netflix either, because haven’t canceled that one for awhile. It’s probably safe in 2020, if only for their steady diet of originals.

What do you think about excess cancel verification pages? Do you like them? Wish they had more? Contrarian viewpoints are welcome and encouraged in the comments area, just please watch the drive-by flaming. Stick around and chat it up a bit. Nobody enjoys a hit and run 😉

How Many Trailers Before The Movie Is Too Many?

Cinemablend poll September 2019

This is something I think long about the fourth or fifth trailer that plays: enough already! Recently, I’ve noticed that after the movie would usually start, they show yet another trailer.

More than half polled (pictured above) in the Cinemablend poll, say 1-3 is enough. Only 5% polled, 5 out of 100 (50 out of 1000, 500 out of 10,000, however you want to look at it), are interested in 7-9 trailers.

A worse trend is something new: showing a trailer when the viewer thinks the trailers have all ended. I used to watch for Olivia Wilde from Booksmart to show up and then the NYU brief film and then the feature would play, but now sometimes there is one final trailer (sigh!). This “new” trailer ad practice is explained at Deadline:

Under a new agreement with major in-theater advertising firm National CineMedia, top exhibitors Regal and Cinemark will incorporate advertising just prior to the “attached” trailers before feature films.

Joy, not.

Head’s up to the powers that be: when you are annoying 88% of the people in the audience when you show “too many” trailers, it might be a good time to change your strategy.