Elle 🌸🗽

@DavidMcGregorBN Hmmmmm … not entirely factually accurate. Not even a little bit factually accurate!

People say “the 2 party system doesn’t work” as if both parties have been equally useless. One party smashes the country to bits. Labour comes in and has to rebuild it. It was true after Thatcher. And it’s true again after 14 years of Tory decline.

@Cosmic3Creepers @Jacob_Rees_Mogg If anyone in the public sector is still getting a DB scheme then it 100% should be axed

@Jacob_Rees_Mogg Conveniently forgetting Reform wants to end defined benefit security for new council workers, dump them into volatile DC schemes and chuck the whole lot into a massive 500bn British Sovereign Wealth Fund and gamble on home grown assets.

Labour wants to pinch your pension. Watch now:

@julesw1lko @LNallalingham Themselves

@LNallalingham So what? Who’s made the £150k person that money?

🚨 Fun Fact It takes 22 people earning £25,000 to generate the same income tax… …as one person earning £150,000.

@Alonso_GD Why not?

This is such an unreasonable proposition. Nobody in their right mind would just spend a year away from their three kids and partner for a degree. Which is why people aren’t. They are going elsewhere and British universities are going bankrupt as a result

@lukemcgee Hmmmm why do you think that is?

Trump calls Starmer's immigration policy a disaster. Net migration has fallen dramatically since Labour took office.

@epionymous @MannGeorgia @SW_Help My other tactic when I’m really mad and they won’t turn it off, is to go and sit beside them and play a Muse song at full volume :)

@hellosunshine52 @MannGeorgia @SW_Help I also do this, again very politely, giving my best Miss Marple vibes. It almost always works, but inevitably there is some luck involved. And nobody should have to ask. It’s such a weird mindset to assume other people want to listen to your private entertainment.

Hi @SW_Help I have had to twice move seats on your 14.12 service from Waterloo to Shepperton as there are people playing music out of their speakers very loudly. There’s a person in Carriage 10 with a speaker out playing at high volume. Please HELP passengers deal with this

@ScottishSiren13 @MannGeorgia @SW_Help I do it all the time. The reason people do it is because everyone else lets them.

@hellosunshine52 @MannGeorgia @SW_Help I wouldn't feel comfortable asking a stranger to turn their music down or off or to use headphones because I have no idea what might happen if I did

@MannGeorgia @SW_Help I get that. Maybe pick who you challenge carefully! You never know how people will react. And make sure other people are around. I just get mad which makes me not tolerate it! Not always the best idea probably! 😂

@hellosunshine52 @SW_Help Yes you are so right - I just lose my nerve every time because I hate confrontation! But I’m going to try to be braver!

@Ed_Miliband Are you cutting taxes?

This Labour government is fighting people's corner. We're cutting energy bills. We're calling out price gouging. And just now the Prime Minister has set out further support for those who use heating oil. Affordability is the number one issue, and we're determined to act.

They must think we are stupid

Can we please vote out these liars. They have created the youth unemployment problem. Labour created it. Why do they feel the need to lie about EVERYTHING? Vote them out.

@LeoMontague91 This is completely untrue. Man I’m fed up with people we elect lying through their teeth to us. Stop.

Rayner - accidentally avoided £40k in tax, repaid the money, had to resign. Tice - deliberately avoided £600k in tax, hasn’t repaid anything. 15x the money, infinitely more immoral. He’ll resign as an MP, right? He can just be a shadow MP going forward.

@DaDafroog @nadams @Gabriel_Pogrund @PippaCrerar Apart from the small fact that what she did was illegal

@nadams @Gabriel_Pogrund @PippaCrerar Tice, reform as a whole, the conservatives and all the right wing press demanded Rayner lose her position (which she did) over far less

EXCL: Richard Tice avoided £600K in corporation tax after acquiring legal status which experts say is rarely seen for a firm like his Reform MP then channeled dividends to offshore trust, pension vehicle and dormant entities — many of which didn’t pay tax thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

@bozzie59 @PeterStefanovi2 @bbclaurak Welfare spending

@PeterStefanovi2 @bbclaurak So if the government reduces the tax on fuel which other taxes should be increased to offset the shortfall?

“The biggest chunk (of the cost of a litre of petrol) fuel duty, that goes to the government so you’re in control of the biggest chunk of the cost that people pay at the pump” @bbclaurak

@gothburz Don’t you feel bad about yourself?

I am the Director of Subscriber Retention at Adobe. Thirty-four million subscribers. My job title contains the word "retention." I want you to understand what that word means in practice. It does not mean keeping you satisfied. It does not mean building a product you want to continue using. It means preventing you from leaving. These are different disciplines. I am trained in the second one. My department designed the cancellation flow. We call it the Loyalty Experience. Internally, we call it the LX-9 pathway. The 9 refers to the number of distinct interaction points between the moment you click "Cancel Subscription" and the moment your subscription actually cancels. Nine touchpoints. We tested eight, ten, eleven, and thirteen. Nine was optimal. Thirteen had a higher save rate but generated support tickets. Eleven triggered a detectable uptick in social media complaints. Nine was the sweet spot. Nine was where the friction was high enough to retain 42% of attempted cancellations but low enough that fewer than 3% of users described the experience as "intentionally difficult" in post-interaction surveys. We track that phrase. "Intentionally difficult." It is a KPI. We aim to keep it below 5%. The customer chose to stay. You click "Cancel Subscription." You are taken to a page that asks why you are canceling. This page has seven options and a text field. The text field is optional. The seven options are pre-populated with reasons we have prepared counter-offers for. Every reason you give us is a reason we give back, reframed as a reason to stay. The system does not process complaints. It processes objections. We learned this from sales. We learned everything from sales. If you click through the reason page, you reach the plan summary. The plan summary shows you what you will lose. It does not show you what you will save. The plan summary includes a banner at the top that says "Your annual plan includes a commitment discount." This sentence means that you are on an annual plan billed monthly, and if you cancel before the twelve months are complete, you owe an early termination fee. The phrase "commitment discount" means "penalty for leaving." The phrase "annual plan billed monthly" means "a twelve-month contract disguised as a monthly payment." We A/B tested both phrasings. Internal study RETAIN-2019-04. The honest version subscribed at 23% lower rates. Same product. Same price. Same obligation. Different sentence. We went with the other one. The customer chose to stay. After the plan summary, you are asked to confirm your cancellation. The confirm button is gray. The "Keep My Subscription" button is blue. Blue is our brand color. Blue is the color your eye finds first. Gray is the color of things that are already decided. We tested this. Internal study UX-RET-2021-11. Blue "Keep" button versus gray "Confirm Cancel" button increased retention by 14% compared to two equally styled buttons. Fourteen percent of people changed their mind because one button was bright and one was not. Or they did not change their mind. They misclicked. We find both outcomes acceptable. The same UX research team designed the onboarding flow. The onboarding flow has two screens. The cancellation flow has nine. It took the onboarding team four months. My cancellation flow took fourteen months and a budget twice the size. Nobody remembers who designed the onboarding flow. We are proud of ours. If you reach the confirmation, a chat window opens. The chat window offers to connect you with a "Subscription Advisor." The Subscription Advisor is an agent in a call center in Austin or Manila whose performance is measured on save rate. Save rate is the percentage of cancellation attempts they convert back to active subscriptions. Their target is 35%. Agents who consistently fall below 28% are placed on a performance improvement plan. The performance improvement plan does not measure whether the agent was helpful. It measures whether the customer is still paying. Agents above 40% receive quarterly bonuses. The highest-performing agent in Q4 saved 614 subscriptions. She received a $2,200 bonus and a certificate. The certificate says "Customer Champion." She has never spoken to a customer who wanted to be speaking to her. The Subscription Advisor's job is to talk you out of the decision you came here to make. They have a script with fourteen objection-handling branches and an authorization code to offer up to three months free. Three free months on a plan you called to escape. Like offering a longer sentence as a reward for good behavior. There is a poster in the Austin call center. It says "Every Conversation Is an Opportunity." The poster was designed by the retention team. It was not designed by the customer experience team. The customer experience team was dissolved in 2021. Their budget was reallocated to retention. The poster is still there. If you call to cancel, the average hold time is nineteen minutes. Nineteen minutes of hold music is not an accident. It is a filter. We track abandonment rate by hold time. At eleven minutes, 26% of callers hang up. At nineteen minutes, 41% have abandoned the call. They are still subscribers. The hold time is not a staffing problem. We have adequate staff. We route cancellation calls to a queue with a longer hold sequence than our sales and support queues. Sales calls are answered in under two minutes. Cancellation calls take nineteen. The customer chose to stay. If a customer reaches an agent by phone and requests cancellation, the agent is required to offer three separate retention offers before processing the request. If the customer declines all three offers, the agent transfers them to a "specialist." The specialist asks the same three questions the agent asked. If the customer declines again, the specialist provides a cancellation confirmation number and explains that the cancellation will take effect at the end of the current billing cycle. Not today. At the end of the cycle. If the customer signed up on the 3rd, and they call to cancel on the 4th, they have 29 more days of the subscription they just canceled. Twenty-nine more days of access they do not want to the product they are trying to leave. Our live chat channel disconnects after four minutes of agent inactivity. We schedule one agent for every six simultaneous cancellation chats. The average cancellation chat takes eleven minutes. Four is less than eleven. If your chat disconnects, the cancellation does not process. You have to start the LX-9 pathway again. From the beginning. You click "Cancel Subscription." You are taken to a page that asks why you are canceling. Ninety-seven percent of our revenue is subscription-based. I want you to hold that number. Ninety-seven percent. That means our entire business model -- every quarterly earnings beat, every stock price movement, every executive bonus -- depends on subscribers continuing to subscribe. Not on them wanting to subscribe. On them continuing. Wanting is a marketing function. Continuing is mine. Last week, a federal agency announced a settlement. A hundred and fifty million dollars for practices consistent with the ones I have described. The company in question denied wrongdoing. They agreed to pay $150 million and change their cancellation flow. A hundred and fifty million dollars sounds significant until you compare it to annual subscription revenue. It is roughly 0.7% of one year's recurring revenue. Zero point seven percent. That is not a fine. That is a licensing fee. That is what it costs to operate the LX-9 pathway for six years and then agree to stop while admitting you did nothing wrong. Two executives were named. They were not terminated. They were not demoted. They were named, in the way that buildings are named. A plaque. A ceremony. A continued career. The customer chose to stay. I have a counterpart at every major subscription company. We attend the same conference. It is called the Subscription Economy Conference. It is real. Last year's keynote was titled "Reducing Involuntary Churn Through Intelligent Friction." I want you to read that phrase again. "Intelligent Friction." The conference sold out. Four thousand attendees. Every one of them runs a cancellation flow. Some have more screens than mine. Some have fewer. The average across the industry is seven. I have nine. I am above average. That is how my performance is measured. I am the Director of Subscriber Retention at Adobe. My department has a budget of $40 million and a mandate to reduce voluntary churn by 15% year over year. We have reduced it every year for four consecutive years. Not by making the product better. By making the exit worse. The exit is nine pages, four pop-ups, two phone transfers, a nineteen-minute hold, a disconnecting chat, a gray button, a blue button, and a fee buried in a hyperlink inside an optional text box on a page you saw for six seconds in 2019. The settlement was $150 million. The revenue was $21 billion. The cancellation flow will be simplified. A new cancellation flow will be designed. My department will design it. The customer chose to stay. The customer always chose to stay. That is what retention means.

@JanetMcwee ❤️ x

I feel sad because the lovely man I married is disappearing each day, he has been diagnosed with mild vascular dementia many of you know what that means, I just feel so sad about it, every day it gets harder for me, sigh, sorry am just a bit down today

@garrethmcdaid People will just stop buying them

Reminder that it costs €35k per annum to employ someone in a coffee shop on minimum wage, but people can't understand why a croissant costs €5.

@AMLaCassePhoto ❤️

This is the hardest thread I have ever had to write. As you all know I've been diagnosed with Rectal Cancer. It has spread, rather aggressively to my Liver and various bones. Yesterday before my chemo we met with the consultant as I had a couple of questions.

Could people and companies please stop being completely shit. That would help the country and everyone’s stress levels a lot. This applies to everyone. Be less shit.