Beautiful Pixel

Time to shake up the usual here. What follows is a rant about the wrong way to handle online subscription cancellations.

Recently I have had the dis-pleasure of canceling two online subscription services one subscription to an XBOX Live game, and Rhapsody. The problem is that in both cases I was required to call up customer support and be on the phone for no less than 20 minutes, just to cancel.

Why is that necessary? I signed up for these services through a completely automated online process, yet I have to track down the support phone number and talk to a person in order to cancel it. It’s obviously not a technical limitation, since charging someone money is far more complicated than not charging them. This only leaves one logical conclusion.

What really annoys me about it is that it feels like I am dealing with a pickpocket, albeit a pickpocket I let into my wallet. They purposefully make the cancellation process hard, so that you are more likely to keep the subscription, even it you don’t use it. Or they try to convince you not to cancel or sell you something else.

The quietly taking money from me while I figure out how to cancel feels incredibly dishonest, and the sales pitch when I am trying to tell them to go the hell away is just highly annoying.

Additionally, while I was looking for the XBOX Live customer service phone number, I came across this page. Scroll to the bottom and click “contact Xbox Support”. Yeah the link doesn’t go anywhere. The HTML for that looks like this:

<a zref="">contact Xbox Support</a>

zref? What the hell? The zref doesn’t even have a value!

I am convinced that these companies are trying to keep me from canceling by means of confusion. As a result, I am far less likely to sign up for a future service, and I sure as hell will ever resubscribe to the same service.

They may make more money in the short term off of people that don’t have their online wits about them. But in the long run, they are left with a confused and frustrated customer base that has a sour taste in their mouth whenever they think about the company that made a simple thing so hard. Word of mouth suffers, repeat business suffers, and people stop liking you.

Basecamp is an example that has it right. They simply have a link on the account page that says “Please cancel my account (I understand this is irreversible)”. If you want to downgrade your account you simply click a link. If you have too many projects to downgrade your account, it tells you that you must delete some projects before you can downgrade. It’s all very easy and clear. There are other examples as well. They are not all evil.

Respect your customer. If they have to be an ex-customer, at least let them be a happy ex-customer.