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Estimating Engineering Time & Effort 

Background 

Integrating a Chargebee Retention cancel flow into your site or app is a two-step process that includes making a precancel request to retrieve unique cancel session URL's that you will expose to your user if they click cancel and considering how you will process cancels and offers as the user exits the Chargebee Retention experience.

The easiest way to get sessions into Chargebee Retention is to use our Javascript snippet on the page where your cancel button lives. If you'd like to make requests from your server or prefer not to use our client-side JS, consider making precancel requests with your own code by using our precancel API.

The second part of the technical implementation is configuring how you will process cancels and offers. When it comes to designing the cancel page itself, your Admin will use the Chargebee Retention Experience Manager to design and build your content, targeting, and A/B tests.


Low code: Minimal development time Cancels and offers managed via Chargebee Retention Offer and cancel processing via URL Offer and cancel processing via Webhook notification
Summary Install the code snippet to route cancel requests to personalized Chargebee Retention page, discover and target audiences. No billing automation. Use email, Slack or third-party tool to route requests to an agent. Install the code snippet to route cancel requests to personalized Chargebee Retention page, discover and target audiences. No billing automation. Use email, Slack or third-party tool to route requests to an agent. Install the code snippet and include dynamic URL's to trigger billing updates for offers that require automation. Adds full integration with billing to process offers + cancels, which further reduces support load, enables a more seamless user experience, and maximizes support productivity gains
Confirmation Pages Static:  Static:  Dynamic. Billing updates triggered via query parameter
Benefit and Difficulty Low: Streamlines but does not reduce tickets Low: Streamlines but does not reduce tickets Medium: Automates (eliminates) majority of cancel tickets  High: Automates all support tickets except for hand-raises by customer
Engineering 1 - 2 days  1 - 2 days 3 - 5 days 5 - 7 days 
Onboarding 2 weeks      2 weeks 2-3 weeks 3 - 4 weeks

Adding the Chargebee Retention.js code snippet 

The basic Chargebee Retention JS snippet works all sorts of magic like:

  • Redirecting canceling or downgrading users through the Chargebee Retention Page
  • Identifying your user and customer account

Here's a visual of how we use the Chargebee Retention JS snippet to personalize your Chargebee Retention Page.

For detailed information on installing the Javascript Snippet, please refer to our help documentation: Installing Chargebee Retention.

Processing offers and cancels 

The second part of the technical installation is the actual processing of cancels and offers. This can be done:

  • manually, by means of emailing all cancel requests and accepted offers to customer support.
  • programmatically, using the Chargebee Retention.js snippet on the cancel page, to update billing via pass-through URLs and/or Chargebee Retention webhooks

Implementation breaks down into three parts, with total engineering implementation time generally taking between 2 (low estimate) and 8 (high estimate) engineering days.

A. Sending the customer to Chargebee Retention

Phase 1 redirects your customer to the Chargebee Retention Cancel experience. At a minimum, this phase is required to set up Chargebee Retention.

Effort                                             Description Time
Low Use only the Basic Fields in the JS snippet, like the name, email, internal-id to connect to a customer's account 1-2 Days
High Bringing in Standard and Custom Fields like usage and activity metrics, plan, value, or other custom data points aggregated in other systems besides Salesforce 2-4 Days


 

B. Implementing Offers

This phase has to do with what happens on the Chargebee Retention Page, and how that's processed within your other systems (most notably your billing system). You'll need to define where customers are sent when they accept an Offer. More details on how that works here: Processing Cancels and Offers.

Effort                                             Description Time  
Low If you already have the functionality to process Offers like pausing an account or offering a discount built into a page, this should be easy-peasy! Simply pass a URL in the snippet that will redirect your canceller back to your app and trigger the action in your billing system . You can also do this without engineering effort by using email notifications to have your support team process manually. You can use the save_return_url to give a confirmation landing page, or send the customer back to their account 1-2 Days
High If you don't have existing functionality to process Offers, and you don't want your support team to process this manually, this can be a timely step. You'll need to create landing pages to send customers post-accepting an Offer, or everage webhooks to processes the Offer within your billing system. 2-4 Days

   

C. Processing Cancels

Similar to phase 2, you'll also need to process cancels: Processing Cancels and Offers. You'll both need a place for your customer to go after confirming Cancel (a landing page) and a way to process the cancel with your billing system. If you don't have an online cancel in place, we recommend starting with using the email alerts to process manually, and creating a landing page with a confirmation message that support will process their request.

Effort  Description Time
Low Like Offers, if you already have an online cancel system in place you can use your existing cancel confirmation URL and add it to the cancel_confirmation_url field in the JS snippet. You can also use the email alert functionality for your support team to process manually, then simply create a landing page to confirm post-cancel.  1-2 Days  
High If you don't have existing functionality to process Cancels, you'll need to create landing pages to send customers post Cancel, or leverage webhooks to processes the Cancel within your billing system. 2-8 Days  

Anything else I should know? 

Everything else is covered in our Proof of Concept (POC) guide: What to expect from a Chargebee Retention POC.

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