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If you're in California NYT is violating state law: https://www.cnet.com/news/companies-must-let-customers-cance... The law applies to all companies and publishers with paying customers in the state.
I had a similar issue with the Wall Street Journal a few years back, and despite having spent the majority of my career working on Wall Street, I’ll never buy a subscription again. I signed up for a really good deal for 6 months of digital + paper delivery, but my paper always arrived a day or two late, so before my 6 months were up I tried to cancel, but couldn’t figure out a way to do so on their website. I message…
Imagine having a business model so fragile that your only line of defense is to obscure the cancellation process through these tactics. Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way? I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy. And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant…
It is such a scummy tactic. I tell everyone not to subscribe to NYT just based on that experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in 2006 an AOL subscriber recorded their conversation with an AOL customer service agent while trying to cancel the service. It was really bad, way worse than this NYTimes process. The NYT wrote an article about the debacle [1] and had this to say about Netflix's great customer service and ease of cancellation, compared to AOL's awful service: "Seeing how Netflix would be so protective of my time were I to leave…
Netflix is notoriously generous here. They allegedly auto-cancel accounts that don't use the service for too long! https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/net...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, but there still remains the issue that such a pointless chat is even required to cancel in the first place.
The interaction didn't seem that bad to me. The business is hurting and valuable. I can kind of see how you'd get there and want "customer retention specialists", who are people that have a job they don't like where they are probably measured on some metric related to how many cancels they let through. Sucks all around, but again I was expecting so much worse. A single chat interaction? Not horrible.
That’s not your problem if you want to cancel.
I've never been able to cancel any subscription with ease, so nowadays I always use Privacy to get temporary credit cards. When I want the subscription cancelled, I try the provider's website, if it doesn't work, I just cancel the card all together.
There is some danger to this since just because your card is declined doesn’t mean that you stop owing them money. Gyms like to take advantage of this.
I have something like 4 subscriptions that I cannot figure out how to cancel on my AMEX. So I cancelled my AMEX. They now have a feature where your subscriptions will follow you any way. I literally have no way of getting rid of like $200 worth of fucking subscriptions unless I want to close my credit card account.
If so, that's known as account updater or card refresher.
https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau
https://www.americanexpress.com/us/merchant/cardrefresher.ht...
Not surprising, and honestly I didn’t think it was that bad comparatively speaking. Try canceling you home cable or your mobile service and see how that goes :) That’s no excuse though, ideally we would be able to cancel any service we want through an online form, but in reality that is a pipe dream. Most companies will take this as a opportunity to make a pass on you with a sales person. And honestly, it is their pr…
Imagine having a business model so fragile that your only line of defense is to obscure the cancellation process through these tactics. Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way? I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy. And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant…
I replied to them no less than 5 times, each time pointing out that (a) I don't have time for phone calls (b) their terms and conditions permits cancelling by e-mail.
Another way is to notify them once by e-mail to end your subscription per [insert T&C clause and citation] and just stop paying. If they don't get payment they'll stop anyway, and if they come chasing after you, you have the notification you sent.
Imagine having a business model so fragile that your only line of defense is to obscure the cancellation process through these tactics. Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way? I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy. And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant…
I said the phrase "I want to cancel cable but keep internet" 23 times to a Time Warner retention specialist then their supervisor, and I may have talked to her supervisor, too. They get paid to ignore you and read back canned responses like "but what about your favorite channels?", "what about watching sports?", etc. It was the first time my girlfriend had ever seen me angry.