Building a membership site can be one of the most rewarding and personally satisfying things to do in business. There’s nothing better than building a business that continues to pay you month after month on autopilot.

Here’s an experience I just had with a particular subscription / membership site service I was using.

I joined it some time ago and it was good for what it did. But the time came when I needed to cancel the membership.

I logged into my account and expected to find something about canceling, possibly a Cancel account link, button or even some information possibly on how to cancel my account should I need to.

But, do you think I could find ANYTHING? No siree! Not a thing. Infact this company was so cheeky enough to not even put ANY contact information on their site. They had a support suite but I guess they thought it would be really funny to disable anyone from submitting tickets so they didn’t allow ticket support?! Just gets better hey?!

I finally tracked down my original receipt for this service which is all I had since they didn’t issue any kind of receipts when the account billed each month (lucky I even had that still) so I sent off an email to that email address.

The only other contact information I could find was on my Credit Card statement with the phone number. So I called the company in the USA from Australia and had to leave a voice message which is fine (as long as they actually get the message).

I know people make mistakes in business, some bigger than others and sometimes things don’t go as planned and you may goof up. But all in all this experience has left a bitter taste in my mouth. At the end of the day I just wanted to cancel my account and didn’t want to have to do anything special to do it other than contact them and make it happen.

So, once again this re-emphasises to me the importance of being transparent and not making it difficult for your clients to do the most basic functions like canceling an account. Extreme Member site owners have the tools to manage their site in a professional way to continue to give maximum value to their clients and keep them happy.

I understand their thoughts that by making it difficult for their clients to cancel they will keep them paying for longer, but this is a very shortsighted view and will ultimately backfire. It doesn’t take long to upset your clients and this is one sure way of doing it. It is most definitely an intentional tactic planned to play of one of the most basic human traits ‘Laziness’ e.g. Make it so difficult and time consuming to cancel that people will say it’s too hard and give up then we can keep billing them and get more of their money ohhahaha!! LOL

Just another reason why I love Extreme Member it is a great tool to help run a “Professional” business.

Have a great day, stay transparent and give good value for money.

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