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Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!
An anonymous reader writes "PC World Senior Editor Tom Spring signed up for 32 online accounts. Then tried to cancel all of them. The most difficult to cancel: NetZero. The easiest to cancel: Consumer Reports Online and The New York Times TimesSelect. His experience was rated on a number of criteria, and highlights the hoops that commercial enterprises put in place to keep their 'customers'. From the article: 'I had a hard time canceling my $5 monthly Gold Classmates.com account, too. I couldn't find any information on how to cancel until I entered the word cancel In the site's search engine. Classmates.com spokesperson John Uppendahl confirmed that there is no other way to find cancellation information. But that was only the first hoop I had to jump through to cancel my membership. Classmates.com also forced me to click through several Web pages reminding me of the benefits I'd lose. Finally my clicking ended at a generic Member Support e-mail contact page containing a blank 'Your Question' field. Though the form said nothing about cancellations, I used it to request that the service cancel my subscription. The next day I received an e-mail message confirming that the service had accepted my request.'"
What makes these companies think that this will make them money?
Whenever I encounter a situation like this (where cancelling is made a pain in the ass), I vow to never again use the service, and to tell anyone I know about what a crappy company it is.
I have actually returned to companies that did not make my life difficult in this way. Sometimes, you just don't need the service. Maybe you will be a return customer. But when they do this crap, they piss people off. They ensure that you will NEVER return and that you will do everything you can to spread the word about what a worthless company they are.
Say what? You have to be kidding.
Cancelling an account should never take more than a few keystrokes and a button click. Maybe two clicks, the second one being a verification -- but if you've ever watched support handle confirmation screens, you know they aren't going to look at them anyway.
This is what admins are FOR: writing the backend code in the DB (and elsewhere) which ensures that, yes, when a user cancels their account, all traces of them are either removed, or the account is put into a 'hold' status if there are things like (as you said) e-mail addresses to worry about.
And no, there should NOT be cancellation charges on ANY service. Ever. None. Zero.
That is what long term contracts are for. If I say I want one year of service, then I pay for one year of service. Even if I cancel after a month. If the company offers me PART of my money back, cool! I think we are on the same page there in a way - a lot of people see a 50 dollar early termination fee as hideous, even though they are actually getting out of, say, 9 months of a 40 dollar per month service. I just despise situations where I *have* to sign a contract, and I have no power to negotiate and nobody else offers shorter terms.
And yes, I've been an admin at a company that had to deal with such. No, it wasn't shockingly difficult to create the system for dealing with this. Though, I admit it was made easier by the fact that, by law, we had to retain most of the information, and thus didn't have to do much more than null out CC#s and put the user in the inactive bin.
Personally, I'd like to see a law that states 'Cancelling may not be any more difficult than creating.' Four clicks to create? Four clicks to cancel. Big bold 'Create Account' button?... You get the idea. If you can create an account via the web, you can damned well figure out how to cancel one.
Anway, enough late night rambling,