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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 t

• samcheng 6y ago
  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/netflix-account-cancel-delete-subscribe-renew-email-a9527626.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/net...
  • hda2 6y ago
    I wouldn't call this generosity. This is the normal conduct of normal honest businesses.
    • e-clinton 6y ago
      Normal? What other business does that? I can’t think of one.
      • bumby 6y ago
        The fact that it’s NOT normal to act reasonably should be telling us something. Imagine if you had to go through this exhausting process in your personal life. After half an hour since asking your spouse to help with the dishes, your spouse finally says “now that we realize using paper plates will solve your problem of dirty dishes, is there anything else I can help you with?” We wouldn’t tolerate that in our personal life so why do we in business? After all, corporations are people... Reminds me of the quote “Being well adjusted to a sick society is not a measure of health”
      • astura 6y ago
        Banks and credit cards cancel inactive accounts.
        • mikepurvis 6y ago
          My experience with this was having a dormant Chase account with like $100 in it, which they chipped away at, withdrawing the $4/mo fee or whatever, until the balance was at $0, whereupon it was immediately closed. I'm not sure if this really counts for much in their favour.
          • CrazyStat 6y ago
            Wells Fargo "accidentally" failed to close my account when I went in person to close it--though they did give me a check for the balance and told me it was closed--and then when I realized six months later it wasn't actually closed, they tried to make me pay them 6 months worth of monthly fees before they would close it.
            • px43 6y ago
              When I closed my Wells Fargo account, they took out all my money, charged me some account closing fee, which over-drafted and fell back to a credit card which now had a balance on it due to the overdraft and they told me they couldn't close my account. I think I ended up paying something like 130 dollars of fees just to close my account, but at that point they'd already screwed me over so many times that I just paid it all and walked out. Terrible, terrible company. Every person everywhere really needs to move all their money to credit unions, our banking system is so thoroughly fucked.
              • lostlogin 6y ago
                I closed a bank account in the UK in about 2001. I emptied it at an atm then walked into the bank to close it. The cashier gave me all the cash I’d already taken from the account.
                • 6y ago
      • kristianc 6y ago
        If you don’t use Amazon Prime during the trial period (or over the year if you sign up for a year) Amazon auto refund you.
        • eightails 6y ago
          Also if you accidentally let your Prime roll over for another month and you try to cancel a few days later without having bought anything that month, they'll offer to refund the most recent payment. Happened to me a few weeks ago, I was surprised.
        • helsinkiandrew 6y ago
          They actually refund rather than just cancel further payments?
          • abenga 6y ago
            I don't know about refunding here, but I love that whenever you cancel Prime, you receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of the period you had paid for.
            • helsinkiandrew 6y ago
              That's actually what I meant - that's pretty good
          • kristianc 6y ago
            If you haven't used any Prime features, Amazon will refund you in full https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GTJQ7QZY7QL2HK4Y https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
        • ianbooker 6y ago
          But canceling prime does not make you a non-customer for amazon. People tend to forget that. You can still order, you still have your account and the refund is an incentive to "come back" -- although you never left. Not to criticize this behavior, just to set it into the proper context. Its just smart to see the potential customer in your cancellations anyway.
      • Silhouette 6y ago
        Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just after they've renewed for another period. Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well. In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by putting through a cancellation that was going to happen anyway a bit sooner, we generate positive sentiment. We often get a nice thank-you message back, with extra information about why someone was cancelling or hadn't been using the app recently. We know for a fact that we have sometimes gained new customers from referrals by those people we helped out a little. Sometimes a former customer's situation changes again later and they come back to us, too. And the reality is that particularly with online payment methods, there's also a small risk that someone will do a hostile chargeback without bothering to even try cancelling, particularly if they forgot about a subscription and changed their email address or something like that. Even if you've done nothing wrong and provide evidence accordingly, you have a good chance of losing a dispute anyway, and one way or another it ends up costing you more than it would have done to preemptively cancel a subscription that you knew wasn't being used for a long time. This is from the perspective of a small business in a niche market, where there is definitely a sense of community and reputation does matter. We've met some of our customers in person, and there are many more mutual connections or friend-of-friend kinds of relationships that might be relevant one day. Maybe things work differently when you're running a huge business with a strong brand in a huge market; I've never done that, so I wouldn't know. But I honestly can't imagine why we'd want to run things any other way. There are few things more valuable to a business like ours than a good reputation in the community we cater for.
        • Stratoscope 6y ago
          I know you don't want to self-promote yourself needlessly here, but do you mind if I ask the name of your company? With a positive attitude like yours, it seems like something I would want to know about.
          • Silhouette 6y ago
            Thank you, I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately if I told you that, I might inadvertently be outing other parties as well through my comment history, and I don't think that would be fair. I hope that our policies aren't that unusual anyway. We're just a small business run by real people and trying to treat our customers as real people too.
      • dylan604 6y ago
        Exactly. The normal SOP is to require a credit card at the beginning of the free trial period in hopes you will forget about it and allow them to keep charging every month.
      • phlo 6y ago
        SkyDemon (a flight planning and navigation app) is a delight for subscribers: * Subscriptions are for one year at a time, and have transparently indicated pricing. No "$2.71 per day, charged annually", no hidden tips, taxes or convenience fees. * If you don't use the app for a few months, they auto-extend your subscription by an extra month as a courtesy. * When your annual subscription is about to expire, they send a reminder a few weeks and another a few days before the expiration. If you don't renew, you get a final "Sorry to see you go, here's how to reactivate for $annual_price, if you don't renew we'll delete your stored data in a few months" email. This is how subscriptions should work. They send an appropriate amount of notification at a good schedule to make sure you don't accidentally forget to renew, and don't pester you to death if you don't.
        • Denvercoder9 6y ago
          But please offer the option to autorenew. I don't want to have to spend time renewing all my subscriptions every year. I have my subscriptions for a good reason and see their charges every time -- if I want to cancel I'll do that.
        • tekknik 6y ago
          This is similar to how Apple handles subs. You get notifications when subs are expiring or renewing, and if you cancel mid cycle you keep it for the remainder of the cycle usually, including free trials. Bonus, you can see all of your subs in one place, and cancel with a single tap.
      • matkoniecz 6y ago
        Beeminder https://help.beeminder.com/article/25-how-do-auto-canceling-subscriptions-work https://help.beeminder.com/article/25-how-do-auto-canceling-... https://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel/ https://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel/
        • PoignardAzur 6y ago
          I mean, they can afford it. Their entire business model boils down to "exploit people's unrealistic expectations of themselves to make money". They obviously feel awkward about it, and they soften the blow a lot, which is to their credit, but at the end of the day this is where their money comes from.
          • dreeves 6y ago
            We don't feel awkward about it! We're leaning into it hard. See https://blog.beeminder.com/focus https://blog.beeminder.com/focus and https://blog.beeminder.com/defail https://blog.beeminder.com/defail But it's definitely not for everyone! If your reaction to Beeminder is "I would not do anything differently and just waste money" then you are probably right and should not use Beeminder. We've been around for about a decade which we think is evidence that there are people for whom it does work. For anyone in the category you describe (tried Beeminder, found their expectations of themself to be unrealistic, quit Beeminder) we definitely want to talk to you. Also calibrating self-expectations is one of things many users tell us is worth paying for.
    • ThePadawan 6y ago
      > normal honest Well, which one is it? /j
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • gsibble 6y ago
    No they aren't. I had my account stolen twice which took calls to customer service to get back and finally cancelled which took hours and you can't do online when you can't even log into your account. I have like $90 of fraudulent Netflix bills.
  • neop1x 6y ago
    Interesting. I cancelled Netflix account 7 months ago and haven't used it since. A few days ago I received "Action needed: Reset your password" due to allegedly "suspicious sign-in". After changing the password and looking into the Recent activity, I couldn't see any suspicious recent login there. So I contacted the support and they said cancelled accounts are deleted after 10 months since cancellation. So now, with 3 months remaining, they apparently send a fake "suspicious sign-in" email in an attempt to convince me to re-activate the account. The email they sent was legit (no phishing) but there was near-zero probability of someone signing in because I used netflix-specific email address and randomly generated password for this account. EDIT: I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
    • spuz 6y ago
      It sounds like there are two departments in Netflix working against each other. One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience (not paying for a service they don't use) and the other trying to retain revenue by any means necessary (sending fake security warnings to artificially trigger activity on an account).
      • PoignardAzur 6y ago
        I wish you saw more absurd situations like this in cyberpunk stories. This mixture of trying to help the consumer to boost your image and sabotaging your own consumer-friendly process to drive up revenue is what late-stage capitalism is all about.
        • throwanem 6y ago
          It's wild that Douglas Adams' and Infocom's Bureaucracy, an interactive fiction published in 1987, had precisely this sort of thing as more or less its whole subject matter. It's not quite exact to what we see today, of course; for one thing, it traffics in paper forms and mail-in cards, rather than web forms and obstructionist live chats. But its juxtaposition of saccharine platitudes and hostile apathy feels no less evergreen for the intervening decades. You're right that the cyberpunk genre lacks a sufficient dose of this kind of absurdity. I think that derives in large part from its original popularizers - I'm thinking here of Gibson and Stephenson, in particular - being in such deadly earnest about everything. Gibson especially, being a literary author trafficking in genre, I think could fairly be blamed for this; Stephenson at least attempted a sense of humor in his most significant work, and sometimes even succeeded, but in his case I think it's more a flaw of worldbuilding in that the mechanisms of transition from the America of his present, to the micro-balkanized future he depicted, were insufficiently fleshed out and thus failed to capture the mounting absurdity of daily life that any such transition I think necessarily entails. Perhaps that's a touch presentist of me, in the case of Snow Crash at least; after all, it was written in far less absurd days than these. Nonetheless, I think most who've followed have felt to some degree bound to emulate - not all, though; for example, the brilliant cyberpunk film The Fifth Element does spend deliberate effort to successfully, if briefly, depict the absurdity of life in such a dispensation. Would that more works in the genre did the same, and in general that they would more broadly update their extrapolation of possible futures to look ahead from today, instead of from thirty or forty years ago. But that kind of work is very hard, so maybe it's not too much a surprise to see it done so rarely.
  • vincnetas 6y ago
    Im not native english speaker, so i'm curious is word "notoriously" is used here properly. What i know "notoriously" means "known for something bad".
    • chickenmonkey 6y ago
      Yes, it's a weird use of notorious. The commenter could have said 'famously generous' instead.
      • brigandish 6y ago
        It’s not weird for native English speakers and is commonly partnered with a positive term.
    • soneca 6y ago
      That could be “infamously”, no?
    • shhac 6y ago
      Notorious has at least two similar meanings; the more common one is "known unfavourably", the second meaning is a neutral "known", not positive or negative. Most people only see the word used in the negative light so shy from it in the neutral use case to avoid being ambiguous or assumed negativity. Using it with an adjective to clarify the meaning here is fine.
      • MauranKilom 6y ago
        As a non-native speaker, my understanding of "notorious" so far has been what you described as the neutral form. However, to me, it does have a slight connotation of obsession or "doing it so much as to be annoying". I am obviously not an authoritative source on how words are understood, but just wanted to add this data point.
  • MrMember 6y ago
    I was kind of surprised at how simple it was to cancel my Netflix account. I was even going to fill out the standard "why are you leaving?" box because I had some strong opinions on changes they had made but they didn't even have one.
• adventurer 6y ago
  AOL was great when you were on a free trial and called saying you wanted to cancel but forgot. They just kept giving me another month. I was given maybe 6 months free when it should have been 3.
• Spooky23 6y ago
  AOL in the 90s was second only to phone companies for being able to scam retention people. In our college house, we’d always run these rackets and get free plane tickets, CDs, tickets, etc. The phone companies were even better. At peak, we’d farm $300-600 a semester for switching long distance.
  • wodenokoto 6y ago
    I don’t understand. If AOL and telcos were scamming people, how did you make money off of their scams?
    • Spooky23 6y ago
      A popular scam was “slamming”. A “bad” phone company would use pressure tactics or lie and get people to sign up for ridiculous long distance plans... $5/minute or something like that. The “loophole” on the consumer side was that of you lived with 5 roommates, you’d transfer the phone service every couple of months and then switch the long distance plans with a legit company like AT&T, Sprint, etc. There was a period of time in the 90s where you would get a check or credit for switching... as much as $200-300! Long distance costs were in free fall and telcos were swimming in cash, so they decided to buy market share.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • dylan604 6y ago
    My favorite of the telco scams was from the bad old days of long distance companies called "I Don't Care"[0]. Apparently, a lot of people didn't care which carrier it was, so these asshats took it to the bank [0]https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1998-08-27-9808260540-story.html https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1998-08-27-98082605...
• 8ytecoder 6y ago
  It looks like an editorial/opinion piece. (Just to be clear I went through the same process and I hate NYT)
• srockets 6y ago
  A friend used to work for a call center handling AOL cancelations. They had a goal of keeping 85% of the callers subscribed.
• jboog 6y ago
  They've been wildly successful over the last several years and are dominating the competition in online subscriptions so I think the advice they've been acting on recently is working just fine. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-times-q3-2020-earnings-nyt.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-t...