The other day I needed to remove a software license from our company Adobe account, and it was way harder than it should have been. You probably know the drill. It’s incredibly easy to add another license: log in, click the big “Buy” button, and now one more person in your company can use an Adobe product.
In contrast, the reverse process is deliberately difficult. Ideally, software licenses would be offered a la carte. Need more licenses? Add them. Need less? Remove them and prorate the unused subscription fee. This would be the most customer-friendly way of doing business, and particularly well suited for software, since software companies incur basically zero marginal cost to let one more person download and use a piece of software.
Instead, executives at Adobe figured out that they could collect more money by making it extremely easy to sign up and extremely difficult to cancel. Instead of a simple button click, I was required to reach out to Adobe support and talk to a person, who spent the better part of an hour arguing with me. “You can just keep the license in case someone else needs it in the future.” “We can bundle more products instead of canceling the ones you don’t need.” And so on. I finally stopped engaging and repeated, over and over, “The only acceptable resolution is to remove the unneeded licenses.” That finally did the job.
This short-sighted strategy is inevitable when companies start to focus on short-term profit over customer experience. It’s absolutely true that adding barriers preserves immediate revenue. Every retained subscription is money in the bank. Someone, somewhere stared at a spreadsheet and figured out that they could rake in millions by making their customers mad. Brilliant.
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