Converting "Auto-Renewal" to Subscriptions
The Problem
A legacy Digimarc product with a sizable user base was using a payment system via Paypal that was being deprecated by Paypal. To continue serving our user base, we needed to update the payment system, however the product itself had also not been updated in years.
Our old sign up pages for this product were quite out of date, with some really wild allowances in the terms and conditions that would never fly today. It was rockin' a real 2008 look, and desperately needed more updates than to just the payment system.
With the patient on the table so to speak, we decided to make a few other updates. A nice part of working on this legacy product is that it operated as a bit of a sandbox for trying out new things and expanding out concepts to the rest of the larger organization, given that we could challenge some long standing business rules without disrupting higher profile clients.
The Fix
One such update was that our old sign up process flow allowed users to sign up for "auto-renewal," which promised to lock in pricing in perpetuity. This was a pretty wild offer on its premise, and given that our terms of service explicitly stated that we could change the price whenever we wanted, I set out to correct this inconsistency.
I went in thinking this would be a simple change - remove the clause from sign up that promised a price guarantee. I ended up making things a little more complex by challenging our old concept of "auto-renewal" and introducing a more modern understanding of what a subscription service should be.
Working with our IT development team and legal, I filled the role of product designer and product manager on the larger project, but interfaced with executive leadership on how to view our larger product suite through the lens of subscriptions.
When I took this to legal, and suggested that rather than being an "auto-renewal" customer or not, we have customers that are either "subscribed" or "unsubscribed," they requested we add something we should have had all along - an "unsubscribe" button. Previously we'd required users to call in to cancel, a proper CX nightmare, so this ended up being a nice "two birds, one stone" situation where we got to both swap over to a subscription model as well as offer customers an easy one-click cancellation option.
We ended up lightly refreshing the entire product, delivering a more modern subscription experience, with a flexible system allowing for a la carte or tiered models. This gave us a great starting point as we began applying the same subscription model thinking to other product, service, and license models within the rest of the company's offerings.
With the subscription model in place, we were able to split the offering into tiers, and offer a much more intuitive feature set with clear pricing based on which features were added.
The Broader Picture
We then were able to export this model more or less to the rest of the business. Every service we offered was reimagined as a "product subscription" with pricing based on feature selection and usage rather than a flat usage price we had been employing for many years in the more important areas of the business that offered us no flexibility for volume, scale, or feature set.