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I upgraded to a LinkedIn premium membership last year when I wanted to use it to make a couple of introductions. It was interesting, but hasn’t become a staple of my networking strategy. After paying $240 over a year, it seemed prudent to downgrade back to a free account.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn provides several automated ways to upgrade, but no obvious way to downgrade. They seem to believe that no one would ever want to leave the fold (unrealistically absurd). Or perhaps they actually think that by making it hard to downgrade, people won’t.

To some degree, it worked. They made $240 from me that they might not have made had I had an easy way to downgrade before today. But now I’ve wasted a lot of time discovering that the only way to downgrade is to contract Customer Service through a web form. The message has been sent, and no response yet received…

What are they thinking? I wanted to downgrade because the membership hasn’t served me well. My feelings about LinkedIn were neutral to positive. Now, they’re negative. Really negative. LinkedIn has gone from “not getting much value from it” to “actively stealing my money.”

Will I return in the future? Probably not. This has left a bad taste in my mouth.

What could they do instead? Make unsubscribing easy. And give people a 3 or 4 question, super-fast-to-answer (radio buttons?) survey to find out why people defect. They will leave with a memory of begin supported and helped and might give useful info for improving the service.

When your customers leave, make it easy. Help them out the door. And as they leave, ask where they’re going, so you can call a cab. And once they’re happily on the way, use that information to find out how you can meet their needs better next time, so customers are leaving your competitor and flocking to you.

Difficult divorce makes reconcilitation unlikely&#…

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