Team

I was part of a cross-functional team of product manager, engineers, legal and commercial stakeholders.

Context

The first iteration of the new MyTutor membership model introduced fixed-length plans for 3 or 6 months. However, many customers wanted to have tutoring for longer than this, and we didn’t make it easy for them to continue. We wanted to remove friction and enable longer tutoring relationships, while supporting customers to stop working with their tutor if needed.

Outcome

By introducing auto-renewal, we increased the average lifetime of a customer from 2.9 months to 3.8 months, generating almost a whole additional month of revenue. Health metrics such as inbound support requests to cancel membership plans didn’t significantly increase, and customers were able to easily cancel their renewal themselves if they wanted to.

Exploring the problem

There were a range of customer needs that we weren’t solving very well with our first membership model iteration - from wanting to change how many lessons you’re having, to extending your plan beyond the initial length. Customers often chose 3 month plans, even though they wanted to have tutoring for longer, as a way to try the service out before committing further.

Solutions and ideas

I defined the different stages of a membership plan and designed ways for customers to achieve what they wanted at each stage, whether that was having more regular lessons, pausing their plan, or stopping working with their tutor.

We identified auto-renewal as a way to make it easier to keep having tutoring, and worked with our legal team to ensure we could implement it in a way that complied with the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

Challenges

We were changing the model and terms for customers. As we were iterating on our subscription model, we still needed to comply with the new legislation around cancellation cooling-off periods and renewal, and maintain the terms existing customers had agreed to. This meant we needed to ensure customers could cancel their subscriptions within 14 days of renewing, and that we couldn’t automatically apply the new terms to existing customers without them explicitly agreeing to them.

I designed a flow for existing customers to opt in to auto-renewal, and defaulted to ending their plans automatically if they didn’t. This reused the opt-in flow and technical logic we introduced for auto-renewal, meaning we could support existing customers with minimal additional effort.

There were other challenges in managing lesson credits that were unused at the end of the original membership, especially when customers wanted to cancel their plan. To quickly deliver a cancellation process that was compliant with the consumer subscriptions legislation, we used Intercom Tickets to enable customers to easily cancel their plans, and our Ops team to carry out those cancellations. This helped us support customers without having to build complex cancellation logic, with existing tools and workflows that our internal teams were already using.