Consumers increasingly expect subscriptions to flex with their needs. In fact, in our upcoming consumer research conducted in partnership with Stripe, we found that 90.7% of software subscribers wanted some degree of subscription flexibility.
As competition in the subscription economy increases and capability improves, businesses need to work hard to retain customers. Enabling fluidity across your customer journey by allowing movement between tiers, the ability to pause or upgrade/downgrade temporarily, as well as purchase add-ons on-the-fly may prove to be one of the best customer retention strategies.
Fluid subscriber customer journeys in practice
Fluidity gives customers control over what they can access, what they pay for, and when they use it, while putting clear guardrails around those choices.
Take a customer who loves your product but isn’t using all the features in their current plan. Without flexibility, their choices are limited to paying for more than they need or cancelling altogether. But if they can downgrade or pause their subscription, you have a better chance of retaining that customer. They’ll get a service they need at the right price point, bolstering their perception of the value they get from the subscription, while you maintain the relationship and therefore the opportunity to grow it over time.
It should be just as easy for customers to get more from a product when their needs change in the other direction. A customer who is getting real value from your service might want to move to a higher tier or add new functionality. Our research found that 82.7% of users said they prefer starting on a lower tier and upgrading later. Offering a user-friendly, flexible upgrade path can similarly improve customer experience and increase revenue.
Fluidity and passive subscribers
In a previous article, we highlighted that both AI agents and new consumer rights legislation bring huge risk to revenue generated by passive subscribers. A customer who is not actively using their subscription may soon use AI agents to monitor their usage, flag poor value, and even cancel services on their behalf. This, coupled with forthcoming legislation that will give customers the ability to cancel a subscription at the click of a button, means passive subscribers are a big cancellation risk.
Optimising your customer experience to better enable fluidity can help combat this in a few ways. Firstly, if a customer can easily change tiers or pause their subscription to meet their needs, they will be more active in managing their subscription in your platform/environment, which in turn makes them more likely to use it. Giving customers these options will provide them with more incentive to stay active, and thereby reduce the number of customers at risk. Moreover, if a customer is managing their subscriptions using a central platform or using an AI agent that points out they are not using a subscription, having the option to pause or downgrade their subscription means they may try that first.
What do you need to consider when optimising for fluid customer journeys?
Here are a few things to consider when designing this type of model.
Pausing a subscription
Putting boundaries around pausing should make the experience clearer so that customers understand exactly what will happen when they press pause and how they can come back.
Be clear about how long they can pause for, how often they can pause, what happens to their access, data, seats, benefits, or unused credits while they're away, and whether billing stops completely, reduces, or turns into a credit.
Designing routes back into active use
Understanding why a customer has left means you can offer a relevant reason to return when the time is right. This might mean reminding a customer who has paused about the features they've been missing or offering a more affordable tier to a customer who left because of budget pressures. For a business with seasonal demand, make it easy to restart when that season returns.
These routes back in should feel useful rather than pushy and customers who are offered incentives must know what they are getting, how long the incentive lasts, what they will pay afterwards, and when the subscription will renew. Returning customers should have the same control over their subscription as existing customers.
The billing capabilities behind fluidity
When someone pauses, downgrades, upgrades, or adds a new feature, the change needs to flow through billing, entitlements, and the other behind-the-scenes systems that rely on that information.
For example, does a pause extend the subscription term, create a credit, or simply suspend billing, and what happens to the customer's access and data? Consider how price changes are recorded, and which other systems need to know the customer's status has changed.
Without the systems to support a flexible front end, every customer change can create manual work, inconsistent treatment, and opportunities for revenue leakage.
Measuring fluidity as a commercial health metric
Instead of looking only at whether someone has stayed or cancelled, you can start to understand how customers move through your subscription model.
Knowing how many customers pause and come back and how often a downgrade leads to a later upgrade will tell you whether your subscription model is genuinely helping customers adapt as their needs change. This will create a healthier, more valuable customer relationship for the business.
What should leaders do now?
Look at how customers move through your subscription model. Where do they downgrade, pause, upgrade, add features, or cancel and why? How many inactive users do you have?
Start with the three most common reasons customers change or leave. For each one, ask whether there is a lower-friction alternative to cancellation. Consider offering customers a cheaper tier, the option to pause, or remove functionality they aren't using.
Pick one customer segment and test a small number of these journeys. Introduce clear pause, downgrade and add-on options, set explicit terms, and measure what happens. Do customers take them up, and does their value increase over time?
Before committing to any changes, make sure your systems can support them. Product entitlements, billing rules, finance processes, and customer communications all need to tell the same story. If a customer pauses their subscription, for example, there should be no ambiguity about what they can access, what they pay, and when they will be billed again.
Customers who pause or cancel today may have a reason to come back tomorrow. Use what you know about their previous usage, stated intentions, and the value you've added since they left to make reactivation relevant. Finally, compare the cost and margin of fluidity journeys with acquisition and blanket discounting.
Preparing for the next era of the subscription economy
Ready to dive deeper into how artificial intelligence, rising expectations, and the demand for flexibility are reshaping the customer journey?
Our upcoming report, Subscriber Behaviour in the Age of AI, based on consumer research conducted in partnership with Stripe, is releasing soon. Inside, we'll explore actionable insights on how AI is influencing everything from discovery to cancellation, what consumers really expect from flexible pricing, and how to prepare your business for AI agents managing subscriptions on your customers' behalf. Join the waitlist today to be the first to receive the report when it launches.
