Anecdata (only because I don't have access to the data anymore). Customer satisfaction is so much higher when they get a one click unsubscribe. In fact, when the friction is so low, the customer is likely to start the subscription back.
I say this as someone who worked in customer service automation. The worst customer satisfaction score with lowest rate of re-subscription is from companies that make it hell to unsubscribe.
I've seen customers send messages like "Cancel and refund immediately!" Since our response was ai driven, we cancel and refund no questions asked in less then a minute (we do fraud check in the background). Many times you get a response back from the customer apologizing for their tone and praising the product. Some of them restart the subscription a cycle or two later.
When you make it hard to cancel, you lose customers on the long term. Make it easy, in fact make it friendly. Unless you are selling a shady product, there is no reason to believe customers won't come back.
Speaking to this myself - I was blown away by Masterclass letting me do this, after I forgot it would renew. I responded to their "hey you've been charged" email with something like "I forgot about this and didn't mean to renew". In perhaps ten minutes I had a cancelation notice and refund.
Way more likely to get their stuff again. Bonus points for not sending the bill from some faceless "no reply" address.
For what it’s worth: I’ve been considering trying out Masterclass because their content seem great, but worried that something will come up and I’ll be locked into a yearly contract or something, so I never tried.
I had a great experience with Audible. I switched from Audible UK to Audible US but forgot to cancel the former. After six months I noticed I had 6 credits I didn't want. I sent one short e-mail explaining what happened and within 15-30 minutes I got a response that said they'll refund everything.
A “you’re about to be charged” email would be friendlier and give the customer a feeling of more control. That’s what we do. (We of course will also refund the charge if you email us after it happens.)
There is this common perception of companies as if they are entirely rational organizations, and every policy that we don’t like exists because it is profitable and benefits the company at the expense of the customer. But sometimes bad policies are just bad, they benefit no one, and they exist for dumb reasons. Maybe call to unsubscribe is one of those policies.
An opposite statement can be said with the same amount of authority though: There is a common perception that companies only create policies we don't like through accidents and unforeseeable outcomes, not by specifically crafting policies to benefit the company. But sometimes bad policies are malicious and designed to maximize profits, even at the expense of long-term profits and customer retention. Maybe call to unsubscribe is one of those policies.
As someone that has worked (briefly) for a company that operated in this fashion (and being a partial owner of one that the CEO tried to shift to this model...we got the board together and fired him), it is not an accidentally bad policy. It is actively discussed as a way to squeeze out an extra pay cycle (and often more) of payments. In recorded meetings or audited channels (such as email) or even PR releases, you are guided to discuss it as a "personal touch with the customer" and to help "lost customers" resolve the issues rather than cancel. You even try to convince your employees/engineers that is the reason. But when it is face-to-face conversations, the discussions are around the dollars and squeezing out as many pay cycles as you can. I know I was being a bit cheeky with my first paragraph, but this is definitely not one of those "whoops, we didn't think this through" kind of policies. If it were, the policy would have changed without the FTC or laws being needed.
I think “companies” have run out of the “benefit of the doubt” as far as I’m concerned. Using the web has become a pain not because companies don’t care about UX, but because they think popup X will increase profits — and it often does.
Certainly there’s a good amount of ignorance in every company, but many choices are purposeful.
I think they often benefit one specific person in the company, who happens to be the decision maker, and don't hurt the overall company obviously enough that anyone stops them.
The third option of hurts the customer and company is also extremely frequent. This can be as low level as developers choosing tools to pad their resume, systematic based on internal metrics, or even very high level internal politics based on which policy ends up making someone or some group look good.
One option supports customers who don't need your service/product _right now_ and the other doesn't.
It's incredibly naive to think that customers are one-and-done for any service. Value is related to context, they may move out of it and back in and your service will make sense again (unless you add costs through shitty unsub. friction that is...)
It's also the difference between an endorsement and a warning to potential referrals. You're not just burning off this one customer, you're hurting your chances with everyone they know.
I always treat my customers/clients the way I would want to be treated, and it always seems to work out for the best. I've also given refunds to some customers without them asking for it first because I value their satisfaction more than I value a few dollars. There's no way to know for sure, but I suspect treating customers like this (like humans) increases retention and well-being, and not only for them, but for me (and my company) as well. It's called the golden rule for a reason. :)
I had a problem with a large appliance. Guy came and looked at it and recommended a course of action that was free and I took it. The problem came back after a month. When he found out his advice didn’t hold, he came immediately to perform a repair because, as he put it, he didn’t want his reputation to be damaged in my eyes.
He offered what he thought was best. When that wasn’t it, he wasted no time getting to the next step. I tipped him more than I otherwise would because his concern over getting it right seemed genuine, and I care more about that than I do getting it right the first time without really caring one way or the other.
> Customer satisfaction is so much higher when they get a one click unsubscribe.
I mean, that's pretty tautological: unsatisfied customers who become not-customers, aren't part of your metric any more! The lower the barrier-to-exit is for your customers, the more survivorship bias there will be in any customer-satisfaction metrics you're trying to track.
When there's zero friction to quitting (incl. a high availability of alternatives to switch to), any time someone doesn't like your company, they'll just churn, and you'll never hear about it. So you'll think everything is great—despite the churn, customer numbers are growing, and all your non-churning customers love you!—even while there's this huge shadow-population of customers who resent your service for one reason or another, but who took that resentment right out the door with them, never bringing it to you to address.
(Not saying this is a bad way to do things, precisely; just that you have to be aware that it's the siutation you've put yourself in, especially when interpreting customer-success metrics.)
An interesting corollary to that effect, though, is that organizations that are effectively impossible to leave (e.g. utilities) will get a "true measure" of satisfaction, with no survivorship bias. If there's "marketing science" to be done on customer satisfaction, utilities are probably a great "spherical cow" simplified environment to study it in.
That's incorrect. A customer who unsubscribes is still a customer and is counted towards CSAT scores. Note, that for many services you can make purchases without being a subscriber.
Also, modern helpdesks are a lot like Mailchimp. As in they handle customer service from many different companies and can track customers across services and score them.
I wish more companies would get this. I don't continuously subscribe to Netflix or NowTV but knowing that I can unsubscribe with a couple of click is one of the reasons I'm happy to sign up from.ti!e to.time for something specific. If I feel li!e signing up is a.risk, I do t do it.
> including an option that’s “at least as easy” as the one to subscribe
Weirdly enough this sounds like a loophole.
I can already see some companies trying to bullshit their way through an investigation: "Oh sure, we don't provide online cancellation, because our way to cancel is even easier than online:" *presents a way to cancel that is in practice more difficult than online*.
I think either mandating that cancelling must be possible using the same workflow as subscription or more clearly defining what "easy" means would be important.
That's just what's in the summary. The actual policy [1] spells this out in more detail with examples:
> ROSCA requires negative option sellers to provide a simple, reasonable means for consumers to cancel their contracts. To meet this standard, negative option sellers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to initiate the negative option feature. For example, to ensure compliance with this simple cancellation mechanism requirement, negative option sellers should not subject consumers to new offers or similar attempts to save the negative option arrangement that impose unreasonable delays on consumers’ cancellation efforts. In addition, negative option sellers should provide their cancellation mechanisms at least through the same medium (such as website or mobile application) the consumer used to consent to the negative option feature. The negative option seller should provide, at a minimum, the simple mechanism over the same website or web-based application the consumer used to purchase the negative option feature. If the seller also provides for telephone cancellation, it should provide, at a minimum, a telephone number, and answer all calls to this number during normal business hours, within a short time frame, and ensure the calls are not lengthier or otherwise more burdensome than the telephone call the consumer used to consent to the negative option feature.
“What’s easier than making a quick phone call? It’s certainly easier than getting internet access, typing a url into a browser address bar, validating a ssl certificate, establishing an http session, authenticating with your credentials then finding and clicking the cancel button.”
2010's GoDaddy, is that you? They used to pull this, then you would stay on the phone seemingly forever until you got a (the?) CSR that would first try the carrot of more services for free if you just re-upped then tried to browbeat you into the deal if you still weren't convinced. Also, the New York times did this, I think you can cancel online now. There should be multiple ways people can sub/unsub, but if you sub in one manner, you should be able to unsub in the same manner without jumping through hoops.
I absolutely detest having to make phone calls, especially when a simple email (or web page click) will do the job.
My main hate is companies that make a big fuss about their availability on the web, right up to when you need to contact them, when suddenly they are absolutely uncontactable, unless you are prepared to hang in a phone queue for hours.
that's not even mentioning seperately fetching, parsing and evaluating the html, css and javascript code, decoding the image formats, often multiple different ones, to render any images on the page and still having to also render the page itself. god help you if it's an SPA and you have to asynchronously make further requests, only to then have to parse those resources also
That's what happens with many of the Unsubscribe (from mailing lists, that is) buttons unless they are provided by a reputable third party such as Mailchimp etc.
The bottom line is if I call up on the phone and tell a company to stop billing me or send them an email from the registered email on file THEY SHOULD BE LEGALLY LIABLE for every time they debit an account after that time. The fact this is not the case completely dumbfounds me.
I think "unsubscribe" should only be offered after a customer has been charged. Before that, it should be "cancel" or "annul".
For instance, if there is a "free trial" period, wait until after that expires, and the customer has been charged, before offering an "unsubscribe".
But aside from the hair-splitting, yes, you are absolutely correct. If I have instant buyer's remorse, I should be able to click it away just as instantly.
> I'd rather not put into the law that strict a requirement on our UI design.
But you all had it your way and it is a net negative for the actual humans who have to deal with not having that UI element available. If it wasn't common practice to skip that UI 'option' in the first place, the regulation wouldn't be needed now.
This is exactly the kind of UI that a company would want to sabotage with dark patterns - so I think if any UI had reasons to have strict legal requirements, it would be this one.
It's not really a strict requirement. If you want to make your cancellation workflow opaque, your signup workflow should be similarly opaque. There's no mandate for a specific UI, just that you can't fuck over your users more on cancellation than on signup.
In the meantime I'm sitting here and reading how the way out of one service includes registered mail. Probably multiple, couldn't figure that out. Fun, eh?
Same thing with The Guardian. Subscribed online and was then told I can’t cancel via email and have to endure a pushy sales call if I want to cancel. Similar experience with The Economist except it was via live chat instead.
These experiences honestly make me want to never subscribe to a newspaper again.
The difficulty cancelling Economist one time put me off from subscribing to a paper ever since. I don't get it, their content is good, let me cancel easily and I'll come back easily. How desperate are those services that they implement measures like that, counting on people to not follow through the cancellation process, forgetting to cancel altogether, etc. And then doing the absolute minimum necessary, e.g. offering the easy cancel button for California residents only because they have to. It'll be the same with this piece of legislation. Sure they'll do it for US residents but they'll continue to pull the same crap for us here in Canada and elsewhere.
They deserve to go out of business in my opinion and I hope they do.
As a WSJ subscriber I'm so used to their blunt "to the point" editorial style that I find Economist articles too long winded and short-storyish. I always get 5 paragraphs in and still can't figure out what the article is getting at. Ain't nobody got time for that.
I don't know if this is the case, but these are exactly the sort of awful "customer retention" strategies I would expect from an organization where somebody is being judged/rewarded based on minimizing customer turnover metrics below some threshold.
The Economist reached the point of calling me to ask if I knew someone who would be interested into a subscription.
I love the magazine but their marketing is really invasive and annoying.
Last time I cancelled they were a nightmare calling me every other day.
I had a different experience with the Economist. I forgot to cancel and was billed. I emailed saying I forgot to cancel, could I unsubscribe now? And got a quick reply saying they'd cancelled and also refunded me despite me not asking.
I recently cancelled again after getting the 1-month renewal warning, and immediately got a 50% off offer, so I'll probably subscribe again.
I had a similarly easy experience with the Guardian a few years ago, based in Europe.
Same with the UK subscription craft beer service, beer52.com [1]. Subscribe easily with a few clicks, but they make you call during office hours and endure 10+ minutes on hold to cancel.
Sadly in the UK I guess we won't get the benefit of any new EU legislation to address this.
When I had an account with Beer52 I them and said, effectively, "This is my notice to cancel and the main motivation to cancel is because of anti-consumer behaviour like having to call to cancel. I do not authorise any further payments and any payments you do take will be subject to a dispute with my credit card company".
To their credit they did send me a reply saying my account had been cancelled and I never spoke to anyone on the phone.
Hah, literally saw the title of the post and came to comments to find beer52 (after dealing with them over a year ago)... must say something about a company.
But I immediately cancelled with card after I tried to cancel the subscription. I misread that and thought I'd cancelled, then got stung with a bill, but they didn't send as they couldn't take payment.
So I retried to cancel and realised what had happened... I think the most annoying bit that that you can _try_ to cancel on their site and then, after answering several questions (are you sure if we offer X or Y), several pages later, they tell you that you need to call them (IIRC the wording if you skim read it almost makes it sound like you _have_ unsubscribed.
For a 'hip' beer company, I was surprised at how baroque it seemed.. I refuse to recommend them to ANYONE, even though I actually quite liked the beer.
Sometimes I wonder what little things differ between countries. But this is new to me. Is it true that you find that hold time to be annoying/out of place in the UK? I once was on hold with an insurance company for ten hours... I began to wonder if 1. something happened that got me stuck in the queue, or 2. if they even had a single person working the lines.
This is the FTC, not the EU (as far as I'm aware theres no EU legislation planned or in place for this).
Of course you could argue that the EU might do it one day, but you could say the same about the UK.
That being said I thought it already was against UK law. Maybe I got that wrong, or there are loopholes around it, or its just not heavily enforced. Who knows
They must have changed recently since I subscribed and unsubscribed online earlier this year with no trouble (I unsubscribed because they signed me up to new email lists without my permission, something another newspaper I'm subscribed to (but will likely be canceling) just did as well :().
The one newspaper I've had no issues at all with is Indian Country Today. They use qgiv and while you can make an account with qgiv to edit payment details, they also send you an email every time they bill your card with a link that lets you unsubscribe in one click with no account (so it is easy to just cancel and resubscribe if you need to make changes rather than needing yet another account). All around excellent experience with ICT and qgiv.
Don't subscribe again. You can read all these articles for free via archive. If they're going to be doing abusive things to you like that, you have a duty to pirate their content.
Having dealt with The Guardian and others like them to cancel, I say "I will not explain why I wish to cancel nor will I reconsider my decision. Please cancel my account. My account number is x, my email is y and my address is z."
I usually have to repeat it 3-4 times before they finally give in and do it.
Very prisoner-of-war-esque. I might try that if I ever get into such a subscription trap. I am just not sure if I could maintain my composure enough to keep saying "please".
In the past when I've had to deal with a retention person and they ask why I'm leaving, I usually just say personal reasons. I've had pretty good luck with that.
I was kinda shocked by The Guardian to be honest with you - I had a similar experience when I came to cancel my subscription to The Guardian Weekly, which is an excellent magazine.
In the end I just told my bank to stop the direct debit - I had a few what seemed like automated payment emails from The Guardian telling me that my payments had failed and to update my payment choices - but other than that I considered my subscription over.
Careful; if you don't go through their unsubscribe process, they can consider the contract still valid, and collect on the legally-still-valid subscription through liens and paycheck garnishments.
Newspapers are awful. I had one thrown in my yard DAILY, that the previous homeowner had signed up for. I couldn't figure out what the publication even was, or how to contact them. I ended up flagging down the delivery guy (4am), he doesn't know who the publisher is and so I just tell him to stop throwing in my yard (put in trash for all I care). It worked for a while, but probably the turnover happened and the next delivery guy started throwing in my yard again. So I wake up, flag him down, and ask for his bosses info. Call them, they're confrontational about it so I basically went on to say I feel they are littering on my property and I will report them to police if it keeps happening (yep, Karen move). That led to them telling me who the publisher was, they had a corporate holding company website, with an image of text instructing how to cancel (not SEO friendly). I had to call. After calling, I had to write a letter to some PO Box. It was insane.
Meanwhile, I signed up for a magazine 20 years ago for $8/year and still get it monthly as well. I haven't paid since, they send me an annual reminder pay which I ignore. I suppose they like including me in their readership numbers to sell print ads, so they keep sending me magazines. Luckily, I enjoy the magazine. Monthly in my mailbox (not wet out in my yard). I would not want to even think about trying to stop the deliveries, they follow me wherever I live.
The Economist I just didn't renew. Nothing beyond that.
What is true is that, with a lot of magazines, to get the best rate you have to select an autorenew option and then they make it difficult to cancel. (That may be the case with The Economist; don't know.) In general, you're better off just paying a bit more and passing on autorenew unless you're sure you want to keep on subscribing.
Can confirm that The Economist requires you to chat with a human to cancel. The representative will basically try to get you a "new" deal to prevent cancellation and the whole process took about 5 minutes (with me just saying no to everything).
Still better than the Globe and Mail though, had to call and talk with them for 10 minutes while they tried to sell me a different subscription.
I told the person at the The Economist's live chat that I was unsubscribing due to that dark pattern. The other reason is that even if the content is great their app isn't. The saved articles feature isn't shared between different devices. Another reason is that you need to get into an article and then get out instead of doing continuous reading. Ended up reading/annotating downloaded PDFs because it was a better experience than using their app.
Similar with New Scientist, needed to phone during office hours and was on hold a while, which would put me off subscribing again in future¹ though in fairness they were very quick to follow my cancel request, not hard sell on staying, etc, once I got through.
[1] of course that is now a moot point as they've been bought by DMGT and I refuse to give any money at all to those in any way responsible for, or benefiting from, the Daily Fail.
When I had to deal with "customer retention dept" as a part of cancellation I was saying that I'm moving to another country and that immediately killed their interest.
Same with the New York Times. Having gone through calling to cancel, I vowed never to subscribe again. Now I simply scan the front page to make sure the end of the world isn’t upon us. (Many days, reading it, it appears as though it is!)/s
I had very good experience with The Economist but, despite that, I'm still hesitant to re-subscribe because I just don't want to bother e-mailing them if I want to suspend or cancel my subscription (or add/remove print etc.).
Since I live in California, which has a “click to subscribe means you must have click to cancel” regulation, this isn’t an issue for me. After the New York Times published their inaccurate hit piece attacking Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, I was able to cancel online just clicking my way through.
I now subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, which looks to be the most neutral newspaper right now. Being a California resident, I have a special “California only” cancel button on my user control panel.
I eventually opened a case with VISA to get them to stop payment to the Wall Street Journal because every time I called to cancel, I got a message that their call centers were closed due to COVID. As far as I can tell there was literally no way to cancel for several months during 2020. I do enjoy their reporting as a more right-leaning alternative to the New York Times but I have learned my lesson and will never again subscribe to WSJ.
Meanwhile, the I have cancelled the NYT several times relatively painlessly (via online chat) and even been offered a discount to remain a subscriber, which I view as a much more consumer-friendly retention tactic.
If anyone from WSJ reads this (unlikely, ha), you should know that it does not matter how good your reporting is - if you use predatory tactics to prevent cancellations you will turn off many potential readers simply out of principle.
I called to cancel last year. Then I had to call again a couple months later because I noticed that, despite calling, waiting on hold, requesting to cancel and then being told that my subscription was cancelled, they didn't cancel it, and the charges continued to go through on my card.
I was able to cancel my WSJ subscription last year through an online chat (it was almost identical to how I unsubscribed from the NYTimes). I definitely would have preferred a cancel button though. A few months later I resubscribed after they offered me a deal. My only issue with them is that they're kind of expensive.
Canceling aside, I don't think the WSJ is particularly neutral, but perhaps it does appeal to your sensibilities (note, however, those are not the same).
I find WSJ to take particularly corporatist/capitialist views on things. Which is fine for things business, I suppose, but I've read many articles from WSJ that are basically "hey government sucks, am i rite?" which is not neutral.
Not that HN is really the place for this discussion, but the _news_ section of the WSJ is pretty neutral and well written. The _opinion_ page is very slanted towards "corporatist/capitalist views".
I don't look for a neutral paper, because I don't think it exists.
Instead, I want to hear the smartest people from the left and the smartest people from the right argue their best points in a calm, reasoned way and check their facts before printing.
I clicked to subscribe to a paid membership for both print and web. Then when I wanted to cancel, they sent me to a chatbot. The chatbot told me told it had unsubscribed me. Three months later (I wasn't at home), I realized WSJ was still charging me monthly for a WSJ subscription. I called them to see what is going on, they told me you can only unsubscribe via a call. I told them I had used the bot which was the only option on the site and it confirmed that I had been unsubscribed. The person told me it only unsubscribed you from Barron's not WSJ.
So yup, after 10 years of loyalty to them, they definitely burnt me and I will never subscribe to them or any of their publications ever again.
The thing the WSJ doesn’t get is this: I wouldn’t had subscribed to them if I didn’t reside in California and didn’t have my special “California cancel” button.
Them: I'm sorry to hear that, what is the cause of
Me: I just want to cancel my account
Them: Lets try and understand what we can improve
Me: I just want to cancel my account
Them: Sir, i understand but perhaps we can explore other
options
Me: CANCEL MY ACCOUNT
Them: ....
Me: Are you having a hard time understanding English
<this literally happened this week> receptionist says he was born in America and found it insulting that I suggested he doesn't understand English.
Me: Glad you understand English. Cancel my account.
Them: We have several options available
Me: Cancel my account in 30sec or I'll contest it with the credit card company
<this literally happened this week> receptionist says in that case they will continue to bill me. FYI: False, Ive now made a documented attempt to cancel my account and they didnt. You can contest it with your credit card company.
Me: Cancel my account in 30sec or I'll contest it with the credit card company, note we're speaking at 2:14pm eastern on 15 november 2021 and i'm noting i tried to cancel my account and you are refusing.
exactly my case. this is why I sometimes subscribe but only on Apple iOS devices, which helps me cancel all those things much easier... and cheers! I also subscribe to the WSJ. A little bit biased here and there but very high quality and neutral. Reading nyt, washpost, etc. can be very exhausting.
I remember about 15 years ago, I signed up for Real Rhapsody's unlimited music service. I tried it for about two months, didn't like it, and found that canceling required me call them on a weekday during business hours (ending at 4pm eastern). I was still in high school at the time, and this is pre-smartphone so it would have been hard for me to do this during lunch, so it was pretty hard for me to cancel. Eventually I had to ask my mom to impersonate me, call them, and cancel it, but it was an idiotic thing. How uncomfortable are you that users will like your service if you have to trick them into staying subscribed?
Granted, it was the Real corporation, I really should have seen crap like that coming.
> How uncomfortable are you that users will like your service if you have to trick them into staying subscribed?
It reeks of insecurity. The issue is that it may be an honest reflection that it fails to deliver actual value.
I can think of many examples of organizations I’ve seen that have used / are a form of dark pattern opt-out/unsub now:
- Wave Apps the accounting software with their payroll service.
- burning man org in their 2020 ticketing presale
- Ancestry.com
What the FTC needs to get into labelinf purposefully confusing unsubscribe interfaces that trick the user into not performing the action of intent as fraud.
If internal docs show intent to mislead, (which in many cases they will) companies should face criminal charges.
If they do something like this, it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product. "The only reason why people would continue to use this product is... if we make it sufficiently difficult to cancel".
When signing up for a product, if it uses tactics like this, I assume the product is no good, and even the producers of the product know it...
So much of the current economy derives benefit from captive customers who are charged ridiculous fees because they have no other place to go (think drinks at a movie theater or baggage fees on an airline, but there are many versions of the captive-customer squeeze), use extortion-type tactics to retain customers (you lose functionality of the product you've "bought" if you leave or otherwise lock you into their product making it painful to leave), or otherwise strong-arm their customers from leaving once they have them on board (high termination fees, impossible cancellation methods, threatening collections if you do a chargeback).
Many SaaS compaines even do this -- luring their customers in with low or even free offerings and then turning off those free or low priced offerings to force their users into higher paying brackets without providing any additional functionality. Pipedrive just announced that they are sunsetting their popular Esssentials plan for no really good reason than to squeeze their customers into a higher plan. I have had other companies decide to arbitrarily double or even quadruple the price of their offering for the same features because they can't find any other way to generate more revenues and probably didn't have the right price to begin with if it can't sustain their business.
Are these products good? Yeah they're decent enough. But these tactics say more about trying to squeeze every nickel not only out of those who would otherwise want to leave, but even those who would like to stay.
> it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product.
It can also show complete and utter overconfidence. "The only reason people would want to unsubscribe is by accident. We're doing people a favor when making it as hard as possible to make that mistake."
If it's so amazing that people only unsubscribe by accident, they'll certainly miss it quickly and subscribe again immediately. The practice of using "dark patterns" to prevent people from unsubscribing is utterly disrespectful.
I also dislike this business practice, but I don’t think the only way it comes about is from lack of confidence in product/service.
Let’s say you were building a startup and had to prioritize limited resources on everything that sucked about it. You’re talking to users, tracking various metrics, trying to get people to use it, and your backlog of things you wished you could do is 3+ years long.
You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.
> You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.
I think many startups undervalue the value proposition of "It's easy to change away from us" or "It's easy to cancel if you're not happy".
I can't even count the number of times I've heard from users signing up to services I've built that one of the top reasons they signed up in the first place, was because it was easy to migrate away if they ever needed to. Preventing vendor lock-in has always been high up on my list of features for every service I build/am involved in.
You don't have to "build" anything. Just have a button "cancel subscription" with a mailto: link... or even some text saying "email us at @ from your account and it will be cancelled within N hours/days".
Currently what most companies (including startups) do is burying the cancellation instructions in some Knowledge Base, or forcing some back and forth via email or phone.
You can rationalise bad behaviour all day, but we all know very well the reason people don't make it easy to cancel.
That would require that there is somebody overseeing the complete user experience. In reality the people who design the product probably never meet the people who design the subscription management systems.
It is a psychological manipulation tactic to make it more difficult to cancel, in the hopes that the subscriber will give up partway through the process because they don't want to pick up the phone.
It's all about profit. The shareholders don't really give a damn about the company's confidence in its product. They care about subscriber numbers and the dollars that come from them. The quality of the product is way secondary to that.
That's not really it. They want a chance to convince you to stay and/or get feedback on why you're leaving. They can also offer some kind of one-off promotion or something to retain people. Subscriber loyalty is the absolute lifeblood of these kinds of businesses.
I work at a non-profit and we collect recurring payments from people who don't actually get anything tangible in return. The membership are rigidly ethical in all their fundraising and messaging, but they think of "call to cancel" as being a fair practice.
If you are concerned that the only way to keep people subscribed is to offer them a one-off promotion when they've decided to cancel -- isn't that kind of a tacit acknowledgement that your product doesn't contain the value that you are charging for? To me, it seems a bit like you've actually reinforced the GP's point...
On the non-profit point of view, that's hard for me to understand -- I run a small non-profit and I can't imagine having any other response to someone cancelling their recurring donation than sending them an e-mail thanking them for their support and offering a conversation for some feedback if they'd be willing to tell us how we could do better. I suppose it depends on the non-profit sector you are in, but often times people giving low dollar recurring donations aren't particularly well off and I can't imagine forcing them to call me and tell me that they love our organization but they're just too broke for a while to continue..
"... a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online, which may include a termination email formatted and provided by the business that a consumer can send to the business without additional information."
But I have one recent anecdote that suggests this language is not specific enough to lead to a very good outcome.
I had a SiriusXM subscription for my car, and paid $52.21 for the past 12 months of service. And they wanted to renew me for something in the ballpark of $20/month ($240/year). I absolutely hate that business practice and having to go talk to them to negotiate a better rate, otherwise they auto-renew you for a much worse rate than you were already on.
So I went to cancel. There is no click to cancel option. You have to call or do online chat. I think the online chat is how they can say they follow California law.
It still took me about 30+ minutes to actually cancel the service, because the person responding to the chat has to run through a script to try to retain you. First they want to know if you are enjoying the service. Then they want to know what stations you like. Then it's "I'll switch you to this new plan that's only $12/month, can I go ahead and do that?"
All the while I'm telling them that the reason I'm cancelling is that they tried to auto-renew me to a much higher rate, and now they are making it super hard to cancel, which makes me want to cancel more.
So I had to go round and round insisting I wanted to cancel. Never did they offer me anything close to the previous rate I was paying. Though I see now that if I re-enabled my subscription I'd get close to that rate again for 6 months. But for a service that I only use when I don't have good cell phone coverage, and the annual time waste they put me through to avoid over paying... It's not worth it.
We talk about UI dark patterns but the people who try to retain you are trained in conversational dark patterns.
If anything these are deadlier in retention then in the first sale. I'm awful at sales but I like to drink with salespeople in hotel bars and otherwise pick their brains and I have had news paper ad and radio commercial salespeople share their retention playbooks with me. (e.g. "Don't you know your customers will think you went out of business if you stop running ads?")
SiriusXM is the worst. My subscription came with the car, but luckily it wasn't auto-renewed. However, after my subscription expires, I got calls every single day from SiriusXM trying to get me to subscribe again. And each time, they used a different number. It was ridiculous.
In the end, I just pick up the call, and put the phone in my pocket. They still insisted on calling for about half a year before giving up.
This is the one instance where I absolutely abuse the 'customer service' reps that call.
I had a similar thing with a previous car purchase -- Sirius would not get the hint that I had already canceled and didn't want to renew. At one point I stopped being nice and started being malicious. The calls quickly stopped after that. Amusingly, when I canceled siriusxm on the car I bought after, they never called once. I do so hope that means there's a note somewhere attached to my name that says "don't call."
Damn, I had that exact same experience. Eventually, in exasperation I said something like "I don't want you to respect my wishes, I want you to act on them." And somehow that did the trick and the CSR cancelled immediately. Of course, I then got increasingly insistent spam from them for the next year.
Some car companies require you to sign you up for a "free" SiriusXM subscription with a new car purchase, which you then have to go through the effort to cancel.
I told the dealership I'd never buy a car from their brand again because of this.
This really ought to be considered an illegal “tying arrangement” but since our antitrust laws are so poorly enforced and overly-emphasize price (ignoring things like quality and customer service) I doubt it’s even on anyone’s radar. The Chicago School strikes again, I suppose.
A couple years back, a friend bought me a one year gift subscription for Britbox[0].
When I tried to activate the gift subscription, the site refused to allow me to do so unless I provided them with a credit card number.
Which, from a practical standpoint, makes no sense as it was a gift.
I wasn't going to provide these wankers with my credit card number[0], so I then had to have an awkward conversation with my friend as I didn't want her to pay for something I couldn't use.
To their (very minor) credit, Britbox did refund the cost to my friend.
[0] AFAICT, much of the subscription industry relies on having your credit card details so they can continue to bill you. Especially with annual subscriptions, as most folks will forget about it until they see the charge on their credit card statement. Then the subscription service has another year for you to forget about it again. Rinse and repeat.
This is one reason I miss one-time credit card numbers. My main credit card used to allow you to generate one-time numbers. You could control the limit on the numbers, how long they would last, you could edit this, and so forth and so on. I loved it because you could give a different unique card number to each site, that would self-destruct after a specified amount of time.
It was great for stuff like this because if they pulled this kind of nonsense, you could just walk away and they were left with a unique card number that didn't matter worth anything. Most of the time, you might only have the number active for a few weeks, so if they tried to charge that number say, a year later, it was obvious they were trying to use a number you had intentionally made limited in time.
This service was discontinued and I really miss it a lot.
I still don't know that I'd go into a contract with any company that behaves this way (newspapers included) but it provided a layer of insurance in case you missed something.
My bank also had (and then killed off) this feature, which I used a lot for exactly the same reason (or ordering stuff from Aliexpress etc.) I have been looking at privacy.com which seems like it may be an acceptable replacement, though it has some strange sign-up hoops of its own.
This seems to be a common design pattern on iOS App Store as well. Download a 'free' app and don't let the user use the app in trial mode unless they click a button that gets them to sign up, subscribe, or buy some in app purchase.
I’m here to vent/rant about this. I bought vsco filters packs ages ago. I haven’t used vsco in a while and I downloaded it again recently. Turns out they’ve moved to subscription based method. Fine, I’m sure I can still restore my old purchases…false. To even use the app to get to the restore button to check this, they made me sign up for an account. After much hesitation I finally did only to realize my old purchases aren’t available anymore.
To top it all off, I tried to delete my account…the app won’t let you!! You have to go to their website and delete it. But wait! First you have to verify your email before deletion. No, not verify email before accessing the account, verify before deletion.
What a trash of a company. Please don’t do this developers.
I am sometimes uncomfortable developing features which I feel arent 100% kosher. For most users they understand what they are buying, but there is a certain segment (lets say 1 in 5) who dont. As the company needs to grow at all costs u can imagine they won't be quick to rectify the situation. Kinda sucks that this is prevalent in our industry.
That is unacceptable behavior, and I entirely understand you not wanting to condone it.
For people who find themselves in that situation, one practical workaround I've found is using a service like Privacy.com which lets you generate dedicated Visa cards that you can pause or limit charges on
Unfortunately Privacy.com requires the generated cards to be paid by a bank account (rather than a credit card). So you have to be okay with them having your banking info.
One or two of my credit cards offers an unmaintained way to get virtual card numbers with dollar and month limits. I'd just use that. Save the awkwardness with the friend.
Readit News
I say this as someone who worked in customer service automation. The worst customer satisfaction score with lowest rate of re-subscription is from companies that make it hell to unsubscribe.
I've seen customers send messages like "Cancel and refund immediately!" Since our response was ai driven, we cancel and refund no questions asked in less then a minute (we do fraud check in the background). Many times you get a response back from the customer apologizing for their tone and praising the product. Some of them restart the subscription a cycle or two later.
When you make it hard to cancel, you lose customers on the long term. Make it easy, in fact make it friendly. Unless you are selling a shady product, there is no reason to believe customers won't come back.
Edit: typo
Way more likely to get their stuff again. Bonus points for not sending the bill from some faceless "no reply" address.
Your comment made me confident that I should.
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As someone that has worked (briefly) for a company that operated in this fashion (and being a partial owner of one that the CEO tried to shift to this model...we got the board together and fired him), it is not an accidentally bad policy. It is actively discussed as a way to squeeze out an extra pay cycle (and often more) of payments. In recorded meetings or audited channels (such as email) or even PR releases, you are guided to discuss it as a "personal touch with the customer" and to help "lost customers" resolve the issues rather than cancel. You even try to convince your employees/engineers that is the reason. But when it is face-to-face conversations, the discussions are around the dollars and squeezing out as many pay cycles as you can. I know I was being a bit cheeky with my first paragraph, but this is definitely not one of those "whoops, we didn't think this through" kind of policies. If it were, the policy would have changed without the FTC or laws being needed.
Certainly there’s a good amount of ignorance in every company, but many choices are purposeful.
It's incredibly naive to think that customers are one-and-done for any service. Value is related to context, they may move out of it and back in and your service will make sense again (unless you add costs through shitty unsub. friction that is...)
It's also the difference between an endorsement and a warning to potential referrals. You're not just burning off this one customer, you're hurting your chances with everyone they know.
He offered what he thought was best. When that wasn’t it, he wasted no time getting to the next step. I tipped him more than I otherwise would because his concern over getting it right seemed genuine, and I care more about that than I do getting it right the first time without really caring one way or the other.
I mean, that's pretty tautological: unsatisfied customers who become not-customers, aren't part of your metric any more! The lower the barrier-to-exit is for your customers, the more survivorship bias there will be in any customer-satisfaction metrics you're trying to track.
When there's zero friction to quitting (incl. a high availability of alternatives to switch to), any time someone doesn't like your company, they'll just churn, and you'll never hear about it. So you'll think everything is great—despite the churn, customer numbers are growing, and all your non-churning customers love you!—even while there's this huge shadow-population of customers who resent your service for one reason or another, but who took that resentment right out the door with them, never bringing it to you to address.
(Not saying this is a bad way to do things, precisely; just that you have to be aware that it's the siutation you've put yourself in, especially when interpreting customer-success metrics.)
An interesting corollary to that effect, though, is that organizations that are effectively impossible to leave (e.g. utilities) will get a "true measure" of satisfaction, with no survivorship bias. If there's "marketing science" to be done on customer satisfaction, utilities are probably a great "spherical cow" simplified environment to study it in.
'We're sorry to see you go! Are you cancelling X because (price/UI/technical issues/moving/no longer need/etc)'
Also, modern helpdesks are a lot like Mailchimp. As in they handle customer service from many different companies and can track customers across services and score them.
Does "least lowest" mean highest? Or did you mean "least/lowest"?
Weirdly enough this sounds like a loophole.
I can already see some companies trying to bullshit their way through an investigation: "Oh sure, we don't provide online cancellation, because our way to cancel is even easier than online:" *presents a way to cancel that is in practice more difficult than online*.
I think either mandating that cancelling must be possible using the same workflow as subscription or more clearly defining what "easy" means would be important.
> ROSCA requires negative option sellers to provide a simple, reasonable means for consumers to cancel their contracts. To meet this standard, negative option sellers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to initiate the negative option feature. For example, to ensure compliance with this simple cancellation mechanism requirement, negative option sellers should not subject consumers to new offers or similar attempts to save the negative option arrangement that impose unreasonable delays on consumers’ cancellation efforts. In addition, negative option sellers should provide their cancellation mechanisms at least through the same medium (such as website or mobile application) the consumer used to consent to the negative option feature. The negative option seller should provide, at a minimum, the simple mechanism over the same website or web-based application the consumer used to purchase the negative option feature. If the seller also provides for telephone cancellation, it should provide, at a minimum, a telephone number, and answer all calls to this number during normal business hours, within a short time frame, and ensure the calls are not lengthier or otherwise more burdensome than the telephone call the consumer used to consent to the negative option feature.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...
You don't piss off gov't regulators
I absolutely detest having to make phone calls, especially when a simple email (or web page click) will do the job.
My main hate is companies that make a big fuss about their availability on the web, right up to when you need to contact them, when suddenly they are absolutely uncontactable, unless you are prepared to hang in a phone queue for hours.
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For instance, if there is a "free trial" period, wait until after that expires, and the customer has been charged, before offering an "unsubscribe".
But aside from the hair-splitting, yes, you are absolutely correct. If I have instant buyer's remorse, I should be able to click it away just as instantly.
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I'd rather not put into the law that strict a requirement on our UI design.
But you all had it your way and it is a net negative for the actual humans who have to deal with not having that UI element available. If it wasn't common practice to skip that UI 'option' in the first place, the regulation wouldn't be needed now.
This is exactly the kind of UI that a company would want to sabotage with dark patterns - so I think if any UI had reasons to have strict legal requirements, it would be this one.
These experiences honestly make me want to never subscribe to a newspaper again.
Last time I cancelled they were a nightmare calling me every other day.
I recently cancelled again after getting the 1-month renewal warning, and immediately got a 50% off offer, so I'll probably subscribe again.
I had a similarly easy experience with the Guardian a few years ago, based in Europe.
Sadly in the UK I guess we won't get the benefit of any new EU legislation to address this.
[1] https://ibb.co/r4LfK5F
To their credit they did send me a reply saying my account had been cancelled and I never spoke to anyone on the phone.
But I immediately cancelled with card after I tried to cancel the subscription. I misread that and thought I'd cancelled, then got stung with a bill, but they didn't send as they couldn't take payment. So I retried to cancel and realised what had happened... I think the most annoying bit that that you can _try_ to cancel on their site and then, after answering several questions (are you sure if we offer X or Y), several pages later, they tell you that you need to call them (IIRC the wording if you skim read it almost makes it sound like you _have_ unsubscribed.
For a 'hip' beer company, I was surprised at how baroque it seemed.. I refuse to recommend them to ANYONE, even though I actually quite liked the beer.
But because they offered a free month to wine52. Easy to sign up, phone up to cancel
Of course you could argue that the EU might do it one day, but you could say the same about the UK.
That being said I thought it already was against UK law. Maybe I got that wrong, or there are loopholes around it, or its just not heavily enforced. Who knows
The one newspaper I've had no issues at all with is Indian Country Today. They use qgiv and while you can make an account with qgiv to edit payment details, they also send you an email every time they bill your card with a link that lets you unsubscribe in one click with no account (so it is easy to just cancel and resubscribe if you need to make changes rather than needing yet another account). All around excellent experience with ICT and qgiv.
https://indiancountrytoday.com/news
https://qgiv.com/
Dead Comment
I usually have to repeat it 3-4 times before they finally give in and do it.
In the end I just told my bank to stop the direct debit - I had a few what seemed like automated payment emails from The Guardian telling me that my payments had failed and to update my payment choices - but other than that I considered my subscription over.
Meanwhile, I signed up for a magazine 20 years ago for $8/year and still get it monthly as well. I haven't paid since, they send me an annual reminder pay which I ignore. I suppose they like including me in their readership numbers to sell print ads, so they keep sending me magazines. Luckily, I enjoy the magazine. Monthly in my mailbox (not wet out in my yard). I would not want to even think about trying to stop the deliveries, they follow me wherever I live.
What is true is that, with a lot of magazines, to get the best rate you have to select an autorenew option and then they make it difficult to cancel. (That may be the case with The Economist; don't know.) In general, you're better off just paying a bit more and passing on autorenew unless you're sure you want to keep on subscribing.
Still better than the Globe and Mail though, had to call and talk with them for 10 minutes while they tried to sell me a different subscription.
[1] of course that is now a moot point as they've been bought by DMGT and I refuse to give any money at all to those in any way responsible for, or benefiting from, the Daily Fail.
Dead Comment
I now subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, which looks to be the most neutral newspaper right now. Being a California resident, I have a special “California only” cancel button on my user control panel.
Meanwhile, the I have cancelled the NYT several times relatively painlessly (via online chat) and even been offered a discount to remain a subscriber, which I view as a much more consumer-friendly retention tactic.
If anyone from WSJ reads this (unlikely, ha), you should know that it does not matter how good your reporting is - if you use predatory tactics to prevent cancellations you will turn off many potential readers simply out of principle.
I find WSJ to take particularly corporatist/capitialist views on things. Which is fine for things business, I suppose, but I've read many articles from WSJ that are basically "hey government sucks, am i rite?" which is not neutral.
Instead, I want to hear the smartest people from the left and the smartest people from the right argue their best points in a calm, reasoned way and check their facts before printing.
I clicked to subscribe to a paid membership for both print and web. Then when I wanted to cancel, they sent me to a chatbot. The chatbot told me told it had unsubscribed me. Three months later (I wasn't at home), I realized WSJ was still charging me monthly for a WSJ subscription. I called them to see what is going on, they told me you can only unsubscribe via a call. I told them I had used the bot which was the only option on the site and it confirmed that I had been unsubscribed. The person told me it only unsubscribed you from Barron's not WSJ.
So yup, after 10 years of loyalty to them, they definitely burnt me and I will never subscribe to them or any of their publications ever again.
Them: Hello
Me: Hello, cancel my account
Them: I'm sorry to hear that, what is the cause of
Me: I just want to cancel my account
Them: Lets try and understand what we can improve
Me: I just want to cancel my account
Them: Sir, i understand but perhaps we can explore other options
Me: CANCEL MY ACCOUNT
Them: ....
Me: Are you having a hard time understanding English
<this literally happened this week> receptionist says he was born in America and found it insulting that I suggested he doesn't understand English.
Me: Glad you understand English. Cancel my account.
Them: We have several options available
Me: Cancel my account in 30sec or I'll contest it with the credit card company
<this literally happened this week> receptionist says in that case they will continue to bill me. FYI: False, Ive now made a documented attempt to cancel my account and they didnt. You can contest it with your credit card company.
Me: Cancel my account in 30sec or I'll contest it with the credit card company, note we're speaking at 2:14pm eastern on 15 november 2021 and i'm noting i tried to cancel my account and you are refusing.
Them: cancels account.
Granted, it was the Real corporation, I really should have seen crap like that coming.
It reeks of insecurity. The issue is that it may be an honest reflection that it fails to deliver actual value.
I can think of many examples of organizations I’ve seen that have used / are a form of dark pattern opt-out/unsub now:
- Wave Apps the accounting software with their payroll service.
- burning man org in their 2020 ticketing presale
- Ancestry.com
What the FTC needs to get into labelinf purposefully confusing unsubscribe interfaces that trick the user into not performing the action of intent as fraud.
If internal docs show intent to mislead, (which in many cases they will) companies should face criminal charges.
by the time a complaint is made then the internal docs have fallen out of the company's retention and backup policies...
When signing up for a product, if it uses tactics like this, I assume the product is no good, and even the producers of the product know it...
Many SaaS compaines even do this -- luring their customers in with low or even free offerings and then turning off those free or low priced offerings to force their users into higher paying brackets without providing any additional functionality. Pipedrive just announced that they are sunsetting their popular Esssentials plan for no really good reason than to squeeze their customers into a higher plan. I have had other companies decide to arbitrarily double or even quadruple the price of their offering for the same features because they can't find any other way to generate more revenues and probably didn't have the right price to begin with if it can't sustain their business.
Are these products good? Yeah they're decent enough. But these tactics say more about trying to squeeze every nickel not only out of those who would otherwise want to leave, but even those who would like to stay.
It can also show complete and utter overconfidence. "The only reason people would want to unsubscribe is by accident. We're doing people a favor when making it as hard as possible to make that mistake."
Let's be real. It's a dark pattern to make people give up on cancelling, rather than go through with it.
The more difficult something is, the more likely people are to give up on any phase of doing that thing.
Let’s say you were building a startup and had to prioritize limited resources on everything that sucked about it. You’re talking to users, tracking various metrics, trying to get people to use it, and your backlog of things you wished you could do is 3+ years long.
You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.
I think many startups undervalue the value proposition of "It's easy to change away from us" or "It's easy to cancel if you're not happy".
I can't even count the number of times I've heard from users signing up to services I've built that one of the top reasons they signed up in the first place, was because it was easy to migrate away if they ever needed to. Preventing vendor lock-in has always been high up on my list of features for every service I build/am involved in.
Currently what most companies (including startups) do is burying the cancellation instructions in some Knowledge Base, or forcing some back and forth via email or phone.
You can rationalise bad behaviour all day, but we all know very well the reason people don't make it easy to cancel.
I’ve never encountered a small startup that relies on call to cancel—only big companies that actively know they’re making it hard to leave.
It is a psychological manipulation tactic to make it more difficult to cancel, in the hopes that the subscriber will give up partway through the process because they don't want to pick up the phone.
It's all about profit. The shareholders don't really give a damn about the company's confidence in its product. They care about subscriber numbers and the dollars that come from them. The quality of the product is way secondary to that.
I work at a non-profit and we collect recurring payments from people who don't actually get anything tangible in return. The membership are rigidly ethical in all their fundraising and messaging, but they think of "call to cancel" as being a fair practice.
On the non-profit point of view, that's hard for me to understand -- I run a small non-profit and I can't imagine having any other response to someone cancelling their recurring donation than sending them an e-mail thanking them for their support and offering a conversation for some feedback if they'd be willing to tell us how we could do better. I suppose it depends on the non-profit sector you are in, but often times people giving low dollar recurring donations aren't particularly well off and I can't imagine forcing them to call me and tell me that they love our organization but they're just too broke for a while to continue..
"... a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online, which may include a termination email formatted and provided by the business that a consumer can send to the business without additional information."
But I have one recent anecdote that suggests this language is not specific enough to lead to a very good outcome.
I had a SiriusXM subscription for my car, and paid $52.21 for the past 12 months of service. And they wanted to renew me for something in the ballpark of $20/month ($240/year). I absolutely hate that business practice and having to go talk to them to negotiate a better rate, otherwise they auto-renew you for a much worse rate than you were already on.
So I went to cancel. There is no click to cancel option. You have to call or do online chat. I think the online chat is how they can say they follow California law.
It still took me about 30+ minutes to actually cancel the service, because the person responding to the chat has to run through a script to try to retain you. First they want to know if you are enjoying the service. Then they want to know what stations you like. Then it's "I'll switch you to this new plan that's only $12/month, can I go ahead and do that?"
All the while I'm telling them that the reason I'm cancelling is that they tried to auto-renew me to a much higher rate, and now they are making it super hard to cancel, which makes me want to cancel more.
So I had to go round and round insisting I wanted to cancel. Never did they offer me anything close to the previous rate I was paying. Though I see now that if I re-enabled my subscription I'd get close to that rate again for 6 months. But for a service that I only use when I don't have good cell phone coverage, and the annual time waste they put me through to avoid over paying... It's not worth it.
If anything these are deadlier in retention then in the first sale. I'm awful at sales but I like to drink with salespeople in hotel bars and otherwise pick their brains and I have had news paper ad and radio commercial salespeople share their retention playbooks with me. (e.g. "Don't you know your customers will think you went out of business if you stop running ads?")
In the end, I just pick up the call, and put the phone in my pocket. They still insisted on calling for about half a year before giving up.
I had a similar thing with a previous car purchase -- Sirius would not get the hint that I had already canceled and didn't want to renew. At one point I stopped being nice and started being malicious. The calls quickly stopped after that. Amusingly, when I canceled siriusxm on the car I bought after, they never called once. I do so hope that means there's a note somewhere attached to my name that says "don't call."
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I told the dealership I'd never buy a car from their brand again because of this.
A couple years back, a friend bought me a one year gift subscription for Britbox[0].
When I tried to activate the gift subscription, the site refused to allow me to do so unless I provided them with a credit card number.
Which, from a practical standpoint, makes no sense as it was a gift.
I wasn't going to provide these wankers with my credit card number[0], so I then had to have an awkward conversation with my friend as I didn't want her to pay for something I couldn't use.
To their (very minor) credit, Britbox did refund the cost to my friend.
[0] AFAICT, much of the subscription industry relies on having your credit card details so they can continue to bill you. Especially with annual subscriptions, as most folks will forget about it until they see the charge on their credit card statement. Then the subscription service has another year for you to forget about it again. Rinse and repeat.
It was great for stuff like this because if they pulled this kind of nonsense, you could just walk away and they were left with a unique card number that didn't matter worth anything. Most of the time, you might only have the number active for a few weeks, so if they tried to charge that number say, a year later, it was obvious they were trying to use a number you had intentionally made limited in time.
This service was discontinued and I really miss it a lot.
I still don't know that I'd go into a contract with any company that behaves this way (newspapers included) but it provided a layer of insurance in case you missed something.
I use this when giving my CC number over the phone when dealing with contractors.
I don't remember those. It sounds awesome.
Dead Comment
To top it all off, I tried to delete my account…the app won’t let you!! You have to go to their website and delete it. But wait! First you have to verify your email before deletion. No, not verify email before accessing the account, verify before deletion.
What a trash of a company. Please don’t do this developers.
For people who find themselves in that situation, one practical workaround I've found is using a service like Privacy.com which lets you generate dedicated Visa cards that you can pause or limit charges on