How to mitigate the impact that debooking/rebooking subscriptions is having on customers?
Need
L&R support has noticed recently that some customers are encountering a negative user experience whenever sales are performing a contract reset. During a contract reset whenever a customer changes their contract (i.e. resets their subscription) the current contract is terminated a new opportunity/subscription is created for them.
When the customer's existing contract is terminated this is having the unfortunate impact that a customer's subscription is suddenly downgraded to free greatly impacting their ability to use GitLab.com as well as providing a negative user experience.
To demonstrate the impact of this issue, I wish to highlight two tickets in the past week.
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Is an Escaalated Ticket that was raised by sales to address this, as you can see in the ticket, sales did not inform support that this was a contract reset issue causing additional overhead for support to debug, I can only assume that they were unaware of the impact of the change
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In this Ticket a customer lost SSO functionality because their account was downgraded as a result of a contract reset, see SFDC
Approach
The current process advising sales on how to handle this change is documented in the handbook:
However, it is missing important, such as:
- The impact this change will have on the customer's current subscription
- What actions the customer needs to take in order to mitigate the impact of this change (i.e self-provision associating their namespace with the new subscription) or contact support.
I propose the following:
- Update the contract reset handbook page to include additional information informing of the impact of this change
- Include a link to the GitLab Documenation and the recently created Video demonstrating how to make the change
- Update the handbook page Common issues the support team encounters with sales assisted queries
- Update all of the sales team with this new information to raise awareness
Benefit
- Sales become more acutely aware of the process and its impact
- This information is provided to the customer whenever they change their contract
- Customers do not suddenly get downgraded to free and lost Gitlab functionality