There’s a cable company (can’t remember which one) that won’t let people cancel. Yesterday, I ran into an old co-worker at the grocery store, and she’s working at a call center in the area that has a contract with the New York Times. She said they are NOT allowed to cancel, no matter what. :eek: :mad:
She stays there only because she really needs the money (and honestly, I think it’s the only place that would hire her; she’s been fired from too many jobs over the years).
I think your friend is referring to it from her perspective. Obviously, customers can cancel if they really want to otherwise there will be billing disputes with credit card companies, banks and possible lawsuits. What she probably means is that she has a really shitty job and is held personally responsible if she lets someone go through with the cancellation but she should have some tools to keep that from happening.
There are companies like Comcast and AOL back in the 90’s that got in serious trouble for making it extremely difficult for people cancel at will. Their hold times were beyond excessive and the agents bounced you around from department to department until, more likely than not, your call got dropped. I haven’t heard of a major company being that extreme lately but that doesn’t mean that they have to make it easy.
I call in every 5 months to cancel my Sirius XM radio subscription because I have never paid full price for it and I really will cancel if they try to make me. The routine is always the same. They make a slightly better offer, I refuse it, they make a better one saying it is the best they can do and I refuse that one too. Magically, they do have one extra special offer for people just like me that only costs $5 a month for 5 months and that is low enough that I take it. I have heard of people getting even better deals than that but I have never tried it past that level.
Call center work is notoriously abusive and works on very impersonal metrics. I think what she is saying that is that her outsourced company is holding her personally accountable if she somehow lets a customer slip away because number of subscribers are their major product. That is still shitty because people have to cancel if they move out of the country or have a relative that was selfish enough to die or something but they don’t care about any of that. It is a sales job and you have to find a way to get it done.
On the consumer side, all you have to do is keep repeating that you want to cancel and tell them that you are contacting your state’s Attorney General’s office if they don’t seem to be cooperating.
I just cancelled my NYT sub. You have to call the 800 number and speak to a CSR who will try to offer you a discount, and then a bettr discount, then they want to know what you favorite section is and how much you will miss it. Hang in there and they will cancel it. Not a big deal, but when i’m done i’m done.
This reminds me of something that happened to me a few years ago.
Shortly after my son was born, I began receiving the American Baby magazine, which I thought was a perk of delivering at a particular hospital.
After six months, it continued to come but I never received a bill so I was like, “Meh. Whatever.”
FIVE YEARS LATER, it was still coming and I still had yet to receive a bill. When my son was in third grade, I finally decided it was time for me to stop getting it. So I called their customer service department, who had my name on file as a subscriber but they couldn’t tell me anything more than I’d been receiving the magazine because I’d bought it through a school fundraiser.
In CANADA.
I don’t live in Canada. Or anywhere near it, for that matter. American Baby gave me the number of the school group I’d supposedly been buying a subscription from all these years (which I’d never heard of them) and suggested I take it up with them.
So I called them. They said they didn’t DO sales outside of Canada, which made me ask how on earth I’d gotten the subscription since I’d never paid for it and never been to Canada so I couldn’t have bought it from them all these years. They didn’t know. But they couldn’t help me…I had to call American Baby back.
American Baby said they couldn’t cancel my subscription unless I had valid proof it was OK from the school subscription group. At that point I was just like, “Quit sending me the magazine. The school group is in Canada, I don’t live in Canada, never have. Never even BEEN to Canada so please please PLEASE stop sending me the magazines. I don’t want or need them anymore.”
Six more similar phone calls and a month later and they DID quit sending me the magazines.
Just tell the first person you talk to that you’re going to stop paying for the subscription, and then, stop paying for it. They may or may not cancel it, but worst case scenario, you’ll get free deliveries of bird-cage liner.
And yes, the newspaper will keep your subscription live for as long as they can, even if you’re not paying for it. They’d prefer you pay for it, of course, but you’re still profitable for them even without. A newspaper’s primary customers are not the subscribers, but the advertisers, and the primary reason they care about the subscribers is that larger numbers make their ads worth more.
I’m beginning to think they’ve built in some interrupter signal because there are so many times my radio station goes out when it should not. This happens a lot but I won’t go back to Sirius since they are such nags
I get snail mail instead with their silly trial units for 5 bucks a month…tossed. They keep coming
If they give you a hard time, just tell them you’re moving. If they still try to hold onto you (like saying they’ll send it wherever you’re going) tell them that you’re moving to a country that forbids women to read. Even if you’re not a woman. If your voice clearly marks you as not a woman and they give you grief that way, tell them you’re highly insulted and wish to speak to whoever’s in charge.