Our product sucks? That’s ok, just don’t let them cancel!
Companies that offer paid services are always trying to find new ways to convince users to hand over their credit cards and start paying. To entice as many new users as possible, most of these companies will offer free trial periods and will make signing up a quick and easy process. Unfortunately, many of these companies try to make canceling the service as hard as possible in the mistaken belief that you can earn customer loyalty through annoyance. In other words, if the service isn’t worth the money or is no longer useful to the customer, just make it nearly impossible to quit. If that doesn’t work and some of the customers manage to cancel, hit them with extra charges and let them try to sort out how to get refunds.
Tom Spring, a reporter for PC World in Boston, decided to take on the unenviable task of signing up for all sorts of free trials and seeing how hard it would be to cancel. In the resulting article entitled “Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!“, the results about as expected. Companies often make cancellation information hard or impossible to find, make the cancellation process long and confusing, and when the cancellation is complete, tack on extra charges.
According to PC World, here are some of the companies you should absolutely avoid if you wish to be able to cancel your account:
- AOL
- BlueMountain.com
- Classmates.com
- ESPN
- MSN Internet
- Napster.com
- NetZero
- Real Rhapsody
- Real SuperPass
- True.com
Now that customers have access to blogs and forums, these sort of business practices are even more ill-advised. When customers get annoyed, they start posting. In an attempt to retain customers, these companies end up with this kind of publicity:
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The reality is that Vincent is talking to an employee who is probably not paid well nor trained well for that matter. Who is behind his relentless attempt to keep the customer? AOL. And it does not appear that Vincent was on the up-and-up with AOL either. It may be his prerogative to lie to the customer service representative, but did it ever occur to Vincent that this would only serve to exacerbate the problem?
Just goes to show that you can’t bully your customers in the information age. A shame they fired the guy. He was only doing what he was trained to do.
Wow, This is a few months old. The buzz was about 4 months ago buddy… Im just jokin’. I used to work at AOL (in the ‘Customer Retention’ Dept.) and this kinda treatment is what your paid to do. They seem to have no problem pissing everyone off. I kinda enjoyed working their. It was fun to pick on people. (I had just got of high school, It was my therpy)