“Three out of four of the cable and broadband customers who called to cancel end up retaining some or all service after speaking with an agent.”
Because threatening to leave is the only way to get a half-decent price?
I doubt they have those metrics verified by an unbiased and qualified party.
Hanging up in frustration and anguish counts as “retaining service”.
Fuck them. Next force gyms and newspapers to allow you to cancel with one click.
Or just force all subscriptions to allow you to cancel with one click
Subscriptions with a dead man’s switch. If you don’t signal you want to keep the subscription after a few years, it’s automatically cancelled. You can sign up at the same price you left with if it cancels automatically.
I’m so lucky, my gym membership auto cancels if I don’t pay in advance.
Yep, my gym would love to cancel my membership. I also paid in advance: 2 years worth for a special limited-time promo. Now, I can renew yearly for $99. Only catch is, if it ever expires, it can’t be joined again. They will pry it from my cold, toned hands!
Yes you fucking should
Subscription-based services already change the agreement of a transaction too much in favor of the provider, because it goes from “convince me that your product is good enough to go through the hassle of obtaining it” to “convince me that your product is bad enough to go through the hassle of cancelling it”. It is only fair to try to tilt it in favor of the consumer as much as possible.
God, hearing them squirm is almost making me horny. Please keep them groveling at the feet of the FTC. I reallllly wouldn’t mind hearing this for a few years at least.
…Funny how whenever Republicans are in power, we get dickheads like Ajit Pai do absolutely nothing, arging that his hands are tied. But when democrats get voted in, the FTC starts drafting rules like being able to cancel a bill with a single click instead of fighting on the phone for 3½ hours with a bullshit sales rep until you have to threaten to sue them in order to cancel your internet or cable package. It’s really funny how that works.
Ajit Pai do absolutely nothing
*cancel net neutrality
We Shouldn’t Have to Let Users enroll Service With a Click. Customers may “misunderstand the consequences of enrolling,”
Sounds ridiculous? Because it is. Clicking the cancel or enroll button is pretty much what you expect… This is utter nonsense, obviously.
They have the right to not let people cancel with a click. They can make it as difficult as they want. It’s shitty but forced subscriptions is all they have.
But I have a vpn and a torrent client. I will never sign up for another shitty, fragmented streaming service ever again. Stop me if you can.
Why do they have the “right” to lock people into an ongoing subscription though? Subscriptions should absolutely be easy to cancel, even if there’s a termination penalty, it should not be on the consumer to jump through hoops and waste their time to get out of it.
I wouldn’t hand that right to them on a silver platter. This is what consumer protection law is for.
The one thing where I agree with cable companies about is the risk to consumers accidentally canceling all or multiple services when they intend to just cancel one. It will be hard to explain that a package price will no longer apply if one part of the package is canceled.
However- it can be addressed with a well-designed cancelation instruction screen. This is a constraint to the communication and process design; it is not an insurmountable barrier like the cable companies are suggesting.
As a software developer who only has business customers, let me tell you the following:
No matter how foolproof your system might seem. It never truly is. There is always some idiot (sometimes with a degree) who just can’t understand/use it.But they could still try and mostly succeed. They just don’t want to.
“When you make something idiot proof, the world builds a better idiot.” Lol
The system doesn’t have to be perfect, just good enough to prevent most customers from accidentally cancelling more than they mean to. Anyone who fucks up can be handled by the customer service department.
You can’t make a perfect UI, because people think differently. What is obvious and logical to one person, is obscure and nonsensical to another. It is impossible to make a one-size-fits-all interface to anything, not just software.
You could make a big, red, flashing button that says “pressing this button will cancel all your channels, are you sure you want to do that?”, and you would still get an significant amount of users complaining that pressing the button did exactly what it said it would because users don’t read.
That’s just the cost of doing business.
The system now is that you have to call them, get bombarded with ads and berated by their customer service for an hour, then maybe they’ll think about cancelling you. And gyms are even worse.
I have a feeling they’ll make it difficult to use. Then when people do it accidentally because of they’re shitty UI, they’ll point to that and say, “see?!”
