It's been an interesting week on the good ship YourPCM. Back into work mode after my trip to Lanzarote to see my folks, the first thing I had to deal with was a pirate ...
Captain Steffi is still in command after a rather interesting week!
This is what we call them when they sign-up, take what they want and bugger off again after just a few weeks. We have powerful discovery tools built in that search for professions around the country. The email I got from them stated, "I've got all the emails I wanted, can you cancel my subscription, please?" Um, ok then ... after just one month as well.
"Here be pirates!"
It's not a pleasant situation to be faced with. It happened before when we allowed exporting during a free trial. People would sign-up for the free trial, grab a load of contacts for free and disappear into the night, ghosting us, and never completing the free trial. So, we put a stop to that by turning off exporting until they've subscribed.
There's not a lot I can do once they've actually paid us some money, but why are they using a different CRM and putting our data in it when YourPCM is clearly superior? People are weird sometimes, pirates doubly so.
And on the subject of churn, I had to cancel a subscription last week as well. Now, £34.99 is not a lot of money for the features and functionality our subscribers receive. But ok, sometimes people don't use a particular part of YourPCM so I'm happy to downgrade their subscription when they need it, all they have to do is choose what they want in the subscriber centre.
But when I couldn't even get them to change their subscription to our £4.99 Minimum Viable Product, just to keep their subscription going and their data intact? That's not the usual "I'm not using this, can I downgrade?" sort of conversation.
For GDPR purposes, as soon as someone cancels their subscription, once the billing period has ended, we have to close down their copy of YourPCM and delete their data. Our MVP strips out virtually every feature, but keeps their data intact and accessible until such time they upgrade again.
"That's why I'm changing to Stripe. Subscription upgrades and downgrades are easy!"
And on a final note, with my sensible developer hat on, I've been redesigning our backend dashboard that keeps track of our subscribers. It was getting a bit unwieldy with so many option switches that the table was extending off the end of my (very wide) monitor and my OCD was playing up.
I've been converting the majority of those Yes/No switches to dropdowns in a popup dialog box, simply to save my sanity. A few tweaks to some other options and charts and I think we're done. A quick and relatively easy change to make life more efficient.
Then I'm back to integrating Companies House data, which is a really interesting project in itself.
Love, light and logic ...
STEFFI LEWIS
Would you like to know more?
If anything I've written in this blog post resonates with you and you'd like to discover more about pirates, do give us a call ...
Foodie, sci-fi nut, cat lover, brain aneurysm & cancer survivor, countryside dweller, SaaS entrepreneur, developer and networker.
Published my first website in 1993 for the Open University and am highly experienced with Windows Servers, SQL Server, HTML, Classic ASP, JavaScript, and CSS.
I've also worked as a professional photographer in Los Angeles, USA and been a vision mixer and producer for live television in my time.
I live in a village north of Milton Keynes with my two cats, Baggins and Gimley, and a large planted aquarium full of unruly tropical fish.
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