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Lesson learned: don't cancel if there's any chance you might want to try another paid plan (a lesson for EN too about customer retention?)


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So with the new plans, I realized that my old Plus subscription was fairly useless -- it certainly wasn't going to get me much of a Tasks feature and one or two capabilities had already dropped off with it. That's fine -- Evernote does need to make money, and I appreciate that the company kept me "grandfathered" on Plus for as long as I wanted to stay.

However, what came next wasn't so great, and while it's partly a lesson learned for me, I'd recommend that EN adopt some customer retention practices from other tools. I was kind of interested in trying Tasks properly, and seeing how the Google Calendar integration might be useful. But I knew I didn't want to stay on Plus, so though I'd cancel first anyway (to avoid accidentally forgetting to cancel later, as has happened to me before). And then I assumed that I'd be able to try out the new features with a trial of Personal whenever I wanted, and that if I actually wanted to upgrade to that, I'd still get credited for the remaining time on the old subscription.

This wasn't such an unreasonable assumption -- for example I recently cancelled my paid Dropbox subscription but it's running as normal until the billing date, and I got a nice note encouraging me to come back if I wanted.

Not so with Evernote. Once you're in a "cancelled" state, it is actually impossible to trial a higher level plan or even to upgrade at all via the online checkout / trial features. They just don't work. And an email to Customer Support asking to be able to try out Personal hasn't got a response yet. I have to believe this is more a lack of foresight in the billing system design rather than on purpose -- which software vendor would actively, deliberately discourage at-risk customers from coming back? Still, it's frustrating.

So, if you're on an older Evernote plan (or any paid plan for that matter), avoid cancelling it until you're absolutely sure that you don't want to return to being a paid customer!

CannotUpgrade.png

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  • Joe Pairman changed the title to Lesson learned: don't cancel if there's any chance you might want to try another paid plan (a lesson for EN too about customer retention?)
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15 minutes ago, Joe Pairman said:

Once you're in a "cancelled" state, it is actually impossible to trial a higher level plan or even to upgrade at all via the online checkout / trial features.

I'm running with a cancelled Premium account that auto-upgraded to Personal   
I got the same message trying to upgrade to Professional

Please let us know what you hear from Support

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2 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Thanks for the warning, it might be helpful to other users.

Tried support yet, as proposed ? No email option I am aware of, just the way through ticketing.

 

Thanks! I did contact support though I may just need to give them more time -- it's only been one business day so far.

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4 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I'm running with a cancelled Premium account that auto-upgraded to Personal   
I got the same message trying to upgrade to Professional

Please let us know what you hear from Support

I see -- it's reassuring actually to hear that it wasn't just me who got stuck in this state. As I mentioned, I have to assume this is just a lack of foresight or some technical limitation of the way the billing system works -- surely this can't be deliberate since EN would be losing some longterm paying customers if so.

Yes, I'll post back once I hear from Support -- hopefully they themselves do have a way to fix this!

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Given that the transition seems to have created a lot of loose ends, I think waiting a little is probably the best strategy. Even if canceled your Plus account should cover your current use cases, as it did before.

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On 7/26/2021 at 6:29 PM, DTLow said:

I'm running with a cancelled Premium account that auto-upgraded to Personal   
I got the same message trying to upgrade to Professional

Please let us know what you hear from Support

Support won't/can't help... I went through the same situation myself.

I cancelled Premium a couple months ago (it ends tomorrow). Changed my mind and thought I'd subscribe to the new Professional. NOPE... The only option is to wait for my cancelled subscription to completely end - and then sign up for a new plan. This info is from support.

I don't even care about the cost. I'm just begging Evernote to take my money. They don't want it unless it's under their terms. It's asinine. 

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Had a similar situation, a while ago. I was on Premium, wanted to continue it, but use points I had acquired.

The site could not handle this change in plans. I had to quit my subscription, and let it expire. There is a 5 day period where the subscribed status is kept even after the magic date. Meanwhile I resubscribed, this time using the points. 6 month worth of Premium, let it run and quit. Again during the 5 days resubscribed to Premium. 

This was not a change in plans, just in payment method.

It seems EN has work to do on its commercial backend, not only on the main app.

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7 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

It seems EN has work to do on its commercial backend, not only on the main app.

Yes, this seems to be the case.

By the way, I haven’t been having any luck with customer support - just one response saying I can’t have a trial of the Personal level and asking what I thought I’d get out of a paid subscription! I’m sure it wasn’t meant like that and the person was trying to help, but this does seem like an odd way of doing business. Surely a long term paying subscriber should have at least the same options that a completely new user has. At this point I’m feeling at the “just take my money” stage as I do need the tasks, etc, to use EN properly. But, I wonder if I’m being entirely sensible putting my trust in a company that seems to be struggling with some of the fundamentals. 

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Well, they expanded support a lot (or support folk gets several user names per individual) during the initial v10 release chaos. Maybe you just got that guy who is still struggling with being customer oriented. No excuse, but most of us here complaining about support (as the company front end) would probably not like to work on the receiving end.

Let me flag your case for a follow up by EN staff. May take a little until you get a reaction.

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