Successful Customer Offboarding is to know the Right Way to End a Relationship with a User

Customer onboarding, within the context of online marketing, is the experience a customer has when they first encounter your website. As important as it is to entice, qualify interest, and provide CTAs in the onboarding process, what is equally important is how a customer’s interaction with your business comes to an end. For that, we look to the term ‘customer offboarding’.

There is an art to bringing customer interactions to a conclusion. Even if you don’t close a product or service sale, if a consumer leaves your website happy, they are more likely to share their positive experience with others and potentially growing your business. If a customer has a negative experience and leaves your business disappointed or upset, this does not reflect well.

There are some businesses who believe customer offboarding to mean doing everything one possibly can to retain the client. That is, make them exclusive promotional offers, provide discounts, and/or do whatever needs to be done to keep their business. At some point though, one needs to recognize when they’re simply not going to reach the customer.

For example, when a client walks into their bank to close accounts and move their finances over to a competitor, this is not the time to be throwing down offers. Be it cancelling an account or service, returning a product purchased, or whatever it may be, consumers need to feel heard and accommodated for. If it takes a consumer too much time and effort to close their business with your company, the act of trying to retain the consumer is going to backfire.

We have all been in that position where a company makes it difficult to offboard. It’s endlessly frustrating having to jump through hoops just in order to leave a product or service behind. The key to businesses who know the advantages of customer offboarding strategies are to make cancelling or opting out easy. Designing a good offboarding experience will, at best, potentially lead to a consumer returning down the line or, at worst, leave them with a positive or neutral feeling towards your business going forward.

Therefore, keep customer offboarding simple. Don’t set up a ton of barriers for someone to opt-out. Above all else, do not knowingly create design patterns of visually confusing design or difficult to interpret copywriting as a way to retain the customer. It won’t work and at the end of the day, it will make you look like you are trying to trick the user into doing something they just plain don’t want. Consumers are not dumb. They will catch on to any guilt-tripping, unnecessary processes, or misleading design patterns.

For a strong, healthy customer offboarding experience, firstly, identify reasons consumers may want to leave your website or company. Perhaps there are areas to improve company processes by knowing where you are losing consumers. Secondly, empathize with the user and consider what they might want to gain from leaving you company. Thirdly, don’t draw it out. Keep the offboarding experience simple and don’t waste anyone’s time. Lastly, no one likes a website begging for ales, attention, or that needlessly upsells. Recognize the value in a fast, to-the-point customer offboarding experience.

These are the strategies we employ in our belief of the right way to end a company-customer relationship. The customer ultimately calls the shots. When they want to opt-out, unsubscribe, or leave, a quality offboarding experience is something that they’ll appreciate.