Parking tickets are a problem in the US
New York alone apparently collects over a billion dollars a year in parking fees, for all kinds of violations.
Back in 2015, Josh Browder was issued over 30 parking tickets in the first year he started driving.
Like most teenagers, paying off a parking ticket left almost nothing for him to spend on anything else
Since each fine was a $100 or more, he went through the laws and looked for ways in which he could get the ticket reversed.
That taught him quite a bit about how parking tickets constitute a nice chunk of revenue for the police department
He found there were strange situations - where two signs in a parking lot gave completely different instructions.
Or where the 'No Parking' signs were covered by trees
He worked on getting some of the fines reversed by sending out letters explaining why the parking violation was unfair. This worked about 50% of the time.
That gave him an idea.
He built an app "DoNotPay' that helped users to send out automated requests to reverse parking fines.
The business model? He charged a flat $3 per month.
And that's where his story took off.
Customers on hold
How long do you wait to speak to customer service representatives when you have a problem?
Five or ten minutes?
In the US, it can take as long as 30-45 minutes on hold before customers get to a human.
And if it is to cancel a service, they are passed further up to a manager with another long wait.
In several companies, this is by design.
The objective is to make the cancellation so difficult that people simply give up, since they have to repeat this manually every time.
Internal service reps are incentivized to keep subscriptions going, with whatever delaying tactics they can come up with
After automating the filing of parking tickets fee reversals, DoNotPay figured a way to beat this routine.
The app calls the customer number and a robot begins to record the call right away after informing the company.
The time it takes to get to a service rep is tracked and so are the responses.
The user needs to come on call only when the service rep is available.
So, it saves time and shines a light on questionable customer retention practices
Reputations are harder to repair than revenue losses.
And companies know that.
The trials that customers keep paying for
How many 'free trials' do you keep paying for after the trial period?
A survey in 2016 showed that over 60% of people in the US forget to cancel subscriptions that renew automatically
That's another problem DoNotPay solves.
It gives the customer a card, and an email address to sign up.
After the trial is over, the card cannot be charged, unless the customer specifically allows it.
It reverses what the companies count on - the laziness hardwired into human nature.
A free trial is the simplest way to commit to a subscription and the date it ends on slips out of memory.
We could be receiving reminders that the card will be charged on a certain date but action needs to be taken.
Login to the created account and cancel the subscription
Seems like a trivial thing but as described in the survey, too many customers keep paying
The free trial credit card is DoNotPay's most popular service.
Built in controls ensure that people don't misuse the service by signing up with a different email account or another name.
Maintaining the balance between genuine trials and keeping freeloaders at bay.
That's a fine line to walk between consumer and company interests.
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The Fightback - Part 1