“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?
The point is that it’s extremely common practice to call your ISP and tell them you’re cancelling so they’ll send you to Retentions and you can get a few more months at “50% off” (a reasonable price). This would be included in those “3/4 people stay”, but those were never actually going to cancel anyway, they only say they are so they don’t have to pay the insanely inflated sticker price.
i’ve worked at a call center years ago on the retentions dep. of some mobile internet provider. after learning of such trickery, i’ll fucking tell everyone that will listen “hey mate, you’ve got a internet/telephone/cable tv subscription? are you in the “fidelity” period? (yeah that shit is a thing here…) ok so listen, AS SOON AS a second passes from the end of the period, this is how you get the actual decent price for service…”
some people had to stop me on my track several times because i was repeating myself to them (forgot who i’d already told about it) because i must make sure everyone knows
been doing it all these years
Yep that’s Comcast. You have to call annually and threaten to cancel to get a semi reasonable price for cable and/or internet.
I have never gotten a better price by threatening to cancel. I was instead told to cancel and signup again in a year or two so I could qualify for “new customer” pricing. There is no reward for loyalty with Telcos.
NordVPN literally will not let me delete my account. My 3 years is over, there is no method to delete when signed in to their site. You have to fill out a form with your payment details and shit to “verify your identity” (who remembers that shit from 3 years ago).
Literally emailed from the email associated with the account, called, logged in, etc. they won’t delete it until I send my credit card info in the clear, over insecure email.
FUCK NORDVPN
If you are in the EU I think you are legally allowed to request they delete all your data. Might be worth it.
They can use nordvpn to change their location to the EU then send the email
Are you talking about those security questions? So dumb. After having days-long trouble getting my internet fixed because of them, I started treating those as additional passwords, generate the answers with my password manager, and save them in the notes section of the entry.
Try to log in from Europe, or change the details of your account to day Europe. Because with gdpr in Europe they are obligated to let you delete it.
I just tried to delete my inactive NordVPN account from a European IP (not through a VPN, I actually live there). Spent 10 minutes searching for a delete option without luck. The only way seems to be by submitting a form (which for some reason also requires “payment info”). Sketchy as fuck.
What prevents you from revoking your payment mandate at your bank?
In Europe at least, your bank must honor this request and there’s nothing your debtor can do about except spending 1000’s to recover at most 3 months of payments with the current legal apparatus in Europe.
Fuck them. Next force gyms and newspapers 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.
By law, anything should be a one click to cancel service, instead of the maze they send you through.
Xbox live, gyms, etc.
Or, it should be exactly as difficult/complicated to cancel as to sign in. Want a 15-step cancellation process involving phones, faxes and a blood offering? Gotta require all that to sign up too!
I think a “let the world burn” approach to consumer agreements, like EULAs and cable TV contracts, would be interesting.
Require users to fully read every word of the contract out loud, on video, 4 times for everything they agree to.
“But it would take too long if consumers had to read our 23 page contract, they’d just give up and not sign up at all!!1”
Hmm, let’s think about that…
German consumer protection FTW
The Fair Consumer Contracts Act will in future introduce a mandatory 2-step termination process […]. Wherever the consumer can conclude a subscription contract against payment, the provider should also give the consumer the opportunity to terminate at the same point. […A] cancellation button should be included on such registration pages for memberships at the first stage (with the wording “Cancel contracts here”). This “first” cancellation button should then lead to a confirmation page on the second level, where the respective user is identified and the consumer can effectively send the cancellation (i.e. with the wording “Cancel now”).
The law (German): https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__312k.html
Not sure how well this has worked in practice. Lots of bad cancellation proceedures last time I had to do it
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.
Honestly, signing up for a service sounds way more risky than cancelling. I think singing up should be 2x more bureaucratic than cancelling it.
