I just canceled my membership at 24 Hour Fitness, but it wasn’t easy, and that makes me hesitant to sign up with them again the next time I’m shopping for a gym. It used to be that you could just call the main number on the website and cancel quickly. But this time I got routed through several options on the automated phone system, only to have it tell me to hang up, go to the website, find my local gym, and call them to cancel. So I did that, and I was then told that I would have to come in to the gym and talk with a sales associate in order to cancel my membership.
Now, there’s only one reason a customer who’s canceling their membership would need to talk to a “sales associate” and that’s to get sold on something, like not canceling. Otherwise any employee should be able to cancel my account in about ten seconds, and I shouldn’t have to spend an hour of my time and $4 on gas to physically drive to the gym only to get pressured into not canceling when I know I want to cancel.
So I called back today and this is how the conversation went:
Me: Hi, I need to cancel my membership.
24hr: Ok, you’ll just need to come into the nearest gym and talk with a sales associate and they can do that for you.
Me: What if I don’t live near a gym anymore? (I still do, I was just wondering what they would say if I didn’t. Would they require that I fly to another state and rent a car in order to cancel? My intent was to simply get the guy to admit they had a process for canceling over the phone and then go down that route, but it turned out to be easier than that.)
24hr: Well, I guess we can do it over the phone then. Can I get your name?
And that was the extent of it, more or less. Apparently somebody is going to call me back in three days and confirm that my account has indeed been canceled, although I’m suspicious that they’re really just giving me a waiting period to “cool down” so that they can try and keep me signed up.
But why make it this hard at all? Sure, maybe most people are pushovers and easily manipulated, I know I have been in the past and still am on occasion, especially if it has anything to do with Ben & Jerry’s. Maybe most businesses look at people and say “Hey, if people will buy more of something if it’s $19.99 than if it’s $20.00 then there’s no end to what we can get away with!” But there’s something inside me that wants to believe that people are smarter than that, that people like to be treated as though they were intelligent, and that when they want to cancel something they really know that they want to cancel it.
I also tend to believe that if you make it easier for someone to get out of something you make it easier for them to get into it. If I’m considering two gyms and one advertises “Sign up for 36 months at $30/month!” and the other says “$30/month and cancel at any time without any penalties!” which one would I sign up for? My risk is greatly diminished if I sign up for the one that allows me to cancel whenever I want at no additional cost, and the more a company with a subscription business model can do to make it easy for me to cancel, the more likely I am to go with that company over competitors.
That’s one of the reasons my company doesn’t have long-term contracts for our search engine optimization services. Sure, I’d love it if all my customers were locked in for 12 months at a time so that I could depend on the recurring income, but I’d rather have some customers than no customers at all, and I’ve found that by getting rid of long-term contracts, going month to month, and letting the customers cancel at any time it gives me an advantage when it comes to signing them up, and most of our customers end up sticking around even though they have no obligation to. They just happen to like the results and feel it’s worth it to keep paying for them. If only my gym understood how this works.
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