Netflix Stops Charging Inactive Customers
BBC (via Hacker News):
The company said the notifications would be sent to those people who signed up with a credit card or other payment method, but have not watched anything in the year since signing up.
It will do the same for other users who have been paying for the service, but have not watched anything in the past two years.
Users with dormant accounts will receive a notification asking if they want to continue with their subscription, and those who do not respond will have their account cancelled.
And your data is preserved if you resubscribe later. Bravo.
Years ago, I heard of a dating site doing the opposite of this. They normally sent periodic digests and newsletters to their users to try to increase engagement, but if a user went a certain number of months without logging into their account, but still allowed monthly fees to be charged, they were labeled as a “sleeping giant” in the database. Once in this state, they would not be contacted by the site for any reason until they logged in again by their own initiative. The site had determined that, on average, contacting these users had a net-negative effect on retention — i.e., they would be reminded that they were paying for an unused service and cancel.
Previously:
