Trusted by thousands of fitness enthusiasts, pliability promotes mental and physical flexibility through daily guided videos on its app.

How pliability Transformed Customer Retention Into a Growth Pillar with Chargebee

With one eye on customer centricity and the other on retention, pliability transformed one of the most inflexible of stages in a customer’s journey — cancellation — into a driver of product direction and scale.

Before Chargebee

NPS-based feedback mapping that did not explain the delta between customer expectation and product delivery

Unidirectional pricing plan that did not aid a dynamic customer acquisition strategy

Lack of control over user cancel experiences

After Chargebee

Product optimization directly informed by customer feedback at the cancellation stage

Pricing experimentation through customer segmentation and contextual offer presentation

Customizable branding cancel-page elements offered more conviction in deflecting churn-risk users

See how Chargebee is a trusted partner in 6500+ growth stories

Both fitness regimes and subscription businesses share an eerie similarity - they are only successful when people develop and nurture habits. When pliability (formerly ROMWOD) - unified both worlds and built their subscription offering, little did they know they were constructing the foundation of a movement towards better mobility for thousands of people throughout the United States.



But any successful ‘movement’ is meant to rally people towards a common goal. pliability understood it and leveraged feedback from one of the most sensitive touchpoints in the customer journey - at exit, and is using that data to not only minimize churn but also to find more meaningful ways to make room for a potential win-back.



A Quick Fix to a Complicated Churn Problem


In the early stages, Pliability operated at a breakneck speed and scaled its customer acquisition. However, as the company grew, Stefano Scalia, Head of Growth, realized that strong acquisitions without fencing to retain onboarded customers could develop into a leaky bucket problem.


“We did not have a churn-recovery process. We had a Stripe-powered cancellation link in our backend that sent users straight to the Stripe billing screen, which they would click and exit from,” Stefano said.


In their search for a “quick win on churn,” Pliability was also looking for a tool readily integrated into their existing tech stack with minimal dev dependencies. “Any organization that requires six people on implementation isn’t doing it right. It shouldn’t be hard to get going, and that’s what I thought was great about Chargebee Retention,” Stefano recalled.


Built for businesses that truly embody speed, Chargebee Retention’s native integration with Stripe Billing allowed pliability to test and optimize their cancel experience instantaneously. Offers co-created within Stripe Billing are auto-populated on the Chargebee Retention dashboard and available for selection in cards displayed on custom cancel pages relevant to individual users’ cancel reasons.



Pliability's fully customized cancel page built on Chargebee Retention



Along with it, Pliability got a full-stack retention strategy up and running with out-of-the-box features like:


  • Skip and pause as offers to deflect at-risk users from churn

  • Trial extensions for low-touch users to exhibit product value, registering a 45% offer acceptance-to-paid user conversion rate

  • Offer A/B testing on different categories to magnify retention performance


“I love how easy it is to configure elements in Chargebee Retention - change branding elements or even offers without reaching out to Customer Success or anyone else. Building a retention strategy with Chargebee instantly saw a decrease in our churn rate,” Stefano added.



Avoiding Innovation Myopia Through Customer Feedback


While initially relying on experimentation to drive product innovation, a scaling business also brought new customer needs. Without a way to accurately capture and attribute feature issues to cancels, prioritization within the product roadmap and bandwidth management became a ‘shot in the dark.’


Feedback captured by Chargebee at the point of cancellation gave developers a clear view of the high-priority requirements that would move the needle on user experiences. Information collected from Chargebee Retention today not only impacts Pliability’s product but also how the business positions itself, thinks about in-app user journeys and nurtures relationships at large:


  • Cancel feedback drove Pliability to realize that making shorter training modules more accessible could better retain users with busy lifestyles, directly reducing churn by over 20% in the last year.

  • Close attention to churn patterns helped them improve their in-app music offering and helped generate better customer experiences while using the platform.

  • Realizing a delta in purchasing intent at cancellation led the team to consider pricing experimentation and discover new ways to retain customers with a lower pricing plan.


“Chargebee is also helping us run pricing experimentation. We will experiment with a limited plan to retain low-ticket users while reducing the barrier to customer acquisition. This will help us engage a wider audience and then grow LTV through upsells/cross-sells,” Stefano said.



The Impact: 20% Improvement In Less Than a Month


Analysis of customer experiences shared at the point of cancellation helped team pliability:


  • Identify the most pressing customer concerns

  • Prioritize product developments thoughtfully, and

  • Build cancel pages that were customized to individual cancel intent.


Together, Chargebee Retention saw pliability report a 20% improvement in retained revenue within one month of implementation.


As they head into their next growth phase, Chargebee continues to inform pliability’s decision-making process, driving product, process, and even customer win-back optimizations.

Headquarters

Wilmington, Delaware

Products Used

Chargebee Retention

With Chargebee, we were able to reduce churn by 20% nearly instantly after deployment. When compared to building an internal solution, with the same feature set, Chargebee Retention was the obvious choice.
Stefano ScaliaHead of Growth, pliability
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