Account Cancelling Nightmares

I had my own experiences the last couple weeks which prompted this topics: have you ever had those absolute nightmares where cancelling an account becomes a chore that takes weeks when it should take a minute. (Such as the AOHell recording that went around the net, will have to look up the link)

I had an old service for hosting my website that was really subpar and I ended up moving to a better service. I went through all the online forms and called into customer service to get it cancelled, and despite my best efforts, was still thwarted by them and had my card charged. (I actually used "thwarted" in the phone call, I'm so proud)

I doubt I'm alone: who else has had a nightmare like this?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I can't say I've ever had much of a problem cancelling a service I received, if only because I tend to be incredibly insistent and demand on getting cancellation numbers. In AOL's case, I hear thats the only way to do it. They will try to convince you THREE TIMES on the phone to keep their service. On the fourth time, they will usually let go, but you need to get a 10-digit cancellation number from them in order to not have to call them back when your bank statement comes in with another charge from them on there.

At least thats what I read someplace.

Threaten legal action. Tell them your conversation is being recorded and you will have proof that you demanded a cancellation. I don't know what else to even SUGGEST in cases like these.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

My experience with canceling the AOL account for my parents years ago probably wasn't that bad, but it took much longer than necessary. The customer service representative asked all sorts of questions about why I wanted to cancel, and that lasted about fifteen minutes. After he finally began the process to remove our account, he didn't confirm until after trying to offer us free service and other promotions. The entire process lasted about 45 minutes or so.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I've never had a good experience while cancelling an account with anyone, per se, but I haven't had any nightmarish ones yet. All my nightmare calls have come from customer service or tech support, and mostly dealing with Dell. Only good thing that came out of that was him giving me my case number: "I as in India" in an indian accent. <2 (not quite good enough for a 3 there, lay off)

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I hated cancelling accounts or services, because the people you have to talk to insist that you stay, and offer all these things for you. And if you have a hard time saying "no", then they almost guilt trip you into staying.

I found that just saying "please cancel my account/service, I don't want any of your bullcrap. I know you're just doing your job, but I dont' want it anymore", usually works and ends the conversation.

I think the next time I cancel something, and have to call someone, if they start talking to me about all these things I could do to stay on, I'm going to start telling them about stories that don't lead anywhere or make no sense, so that they'll want to hang up on me lol.

I think companies are developing these tactics in response to people leaving or because that's the best time to offer them services they don't really need. That's probably why new credit cards and stuff require you to call the company to activate it (I've had to do that with a Sears card and a Best Buy card now), and both times the people I talked to tried to offer me a program which I didn't want (I could've just hung up on them, but I didn't want to be mean). Used to just be that you could dial your card number into an automated system, then the card would be activated then and there in contrast.

I did interupt them and ask if my card was activated though, and once they said it was, I told them that's all I wanted, then they thanked me, and hung up I think next time I have to do that, I'm going to say "thanks" as soon as they tell me my account or card is active/cancelled, then just hang up. Yeah, it's mean, and they're just doing their job, but ugh, stop making me pay for more crap I don't want lol.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I haven't had any issues with cancelling accounts yet. I'm pretty satisfied with all the companies I'm associated with at the moment. However, I know that when the time comes to make any changes, it won't be the least bit entertaining. I used to work customer service for DirecTV over the phone and am fully aware of all the tricks representatives try to keep customers as part of the company. Luckily I haven't been doing that for over 2 years now

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Cancelling our satellite TV service - holy fuckballs, I've never been so frustrated in my life. Took me about 45 minutes of repeating myself to get shit done - I was just about to go to the offices in person and raise all kinds of hell until they finally cancelled the account.

FELIPE NO

Oh yeah, I had problems with my cell phone service.

First I call them, get it cancelled, the girl tells me that we don't have to pay that month's bill and wait for a commulative bill (kinda like BS) and pay that. A month or so went by, we got it and paid that. We expected no problems after that... lo behold though 3 months LATER, we got a bill that costs 3 months worth of service. I'm like wtf?

We called them immediately and found out that when we paid that cummalative bill, we reactatived the service... :\ HOW F*CKING LAME. Of course the caller made up excuses for the previous caller that she didn't do it right or whatever. I don't believe a word of it.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I haven't had any real issues with canceling the few things I've needed to. The only major ones I had to call in for were Earthlink and MSN dial-up internet services, and overall they were pretty easy to work with. The person from MSN sounded almost sympathetic when I told them the internet service was too slow and I didn't have broadband available in the area.

I can't say the same about when I've had to call for tech support though. Most of the time the tech support people from India that you'll almost certainly end up talking to don't have any knowledge of computers whatsoever (yeah yeah, elephant in the room). My friend had called in about his computer having all kinds of issues: random blue screens of death, programs crashing, static over the speakers, etc. and after taking several minutes to explain all the problem, the Indian tech support guy went "...have you turned on your monitor?". Oh well, at least when I needed to activate Windows XP over the phone I didn't have any trouble and the person could speak English clear enough.

On the other hand, you might end up with someone like this:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dxq3zJ8djo4

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I was the one who was handed the task of getting rid of my grandmother's AOL account. Not a pleasant experience in the least. However, it was beaten.

I made a couple of upgrades to a friend's Dell to the point where Windows wanted to reactivate. Except OEM licenses aren't supposed to be able to do that. So I was bounced from Microsoft to Dell back and forth, neither one wanting to solve the problem. I finally managed to talk to an actual Human at Microsoft and told them, in no soft terms, that they would either re-activate Windows right then and there or I would hang up and install a pirated copy. Interestingly enough, they re-activated the copy.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I've personally never had any really bad experiences, but I've heard end user half's of many such annoying conversations. They usually don't end well...

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thankfully no, however, where I work, I have to deal with that all day, so i know how tough it can be. thank god my service providers haven't let me down

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

AOL are awful. You have to be motivated and forceful in your manner when cancelling with them over the phone or else they give you the third degree about why you're cancelling, and they don't seem to accept "you're CRAP" as an answer. Even after you've cancelled, they send you junk mail trying to persuade you to come back. My sister had to cancel an account with them a few years ago and they kept on charging her account even after she had severed ties with them.

I was speaking idiomatically.

The worst I'd have to say by far is AOL, took 25 minutes just to get my account canceled.

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I'd say that SBC was pretty bad in getting me to cancel DSL.

The problem with DSL lines is that I was switching to a different service provider, and SBC had to permanently remove the line for me to switch to Earthlink (which I chose because they used a better service, Covad, instead). After about 2 support calls, lasting 35 minutes, they finally "cancelled" the account. I had to call about 5 days later because they were just too lazy to remove the line.

On the other hand, cancelling Earthlink was the easiest phone call I ever had.

After a 2 minute hold, I got this:

Me: Hi, I'm [arch_slayer] and the last four digits of my social security number are XXXX.

Person: Ok, what would you like to do today?

Me: I'd like to cancel my Earthlink service because I'm switching to a different internet service provider. I've had physical limitations on the Earthlink service in the past, even though your support has done extremely well at debugging, so I feel that another ISP would be better.

Person: Are you sure, we could transfer you to a level 3 support technician

Me: Yep, I already talked to one, and we both agree that cable is better because my local DSL hub is located over 10,000 feet away.

Person: OK, done, have a nice day.

FELIPE NO

AOL is ridiculous. And like many other people, I have an AOL canceling story due to my family's discovery of broadband internet and I will to change services as soon as possible.

I forget what the issue was, but I think AOL wouldn't let us cancel our account because we (My mom, brother and I) didn't remember our security question and answer, or something like that. It didn't make any sense, but basically my mom got pissed off and hung out. I think our solution was the call the credit card company and tell them to stop paying AOL as we tried to cancel our service. We got a letter from AOL saying they were sad to see us cancel or whatever a few days afterwards, but they were the worst I've ever had to deal with.

My Mom's had problems with Sam's Club though.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

The only accounts I've had to go through canceling were various web hosting services. That was pretty painless. Related I guess was also switching cell phone providers, and that was easy too the one time I had to do that.

My dad, on the other hand, abuses accounts in terms of cancelling and signing-up for thing. =p For example, with broadband service, if Verizon has a good sign-up deal for "new customers," even though we wouldn't be a new customer he'd somehow swithc to Verizon and still get the promotion. Then after that's done and if, say, Comcast has something going on, he'll switch to that. Maybe it's related to good credit? I dunno, but he wins.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Nope, never. But I did have a problem once with a gym charging more than once on my debit card per month. Not sure if you can do this with your problem, but I just had my company put a block on those fuckers drawing money out more than once a month. I'm sure you can just block a fucker indefinitely if you want.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

XBox live. Good lord.

I bought one of those XBL Gold packages at Best Buy a while ago, and when the year of subscription was up, I called Microsoft to cancel the account.

The person on the other end of the line kept apologizing to me and kept going on about how Halo 2 was going to be XBL enabled. After telling her I wasn't going to even be owning an Xbox soon and that I thought Halo was shit, every other time she asked for some sort of info, that question kept popping up.

"Oh, I am so sorry you want to cancel. Did you know that Halo 2 is coming out soon, and that it will be online?"

Went through 20 minutes of this before she finally told me that my subscription was cancelled.

Fucking Halo

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I haven't had any trouble canceling accounts on and offline services myself, but figured you all might be like the following article at PCWorld. Very interesting...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,12...e/article.html

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I moved to Japan and before I left I called vodafone to cancel my mobile phone, clearly stating that I was leaving the country (though lied and said indefinately to get rid of them) I had to wait the month to terminate and so I took my phone with me to make sure (and to keep in touch with people at home and let them know I'd arrived safe)

Vodafone kept ringing me every other day.
at 6pm British time.
This translates to 3am Japan time (give or take)
They kept asking if I was sure i wanted to cancel my contract. Sufficed to say I went absolutely apeshit on the phone and they never rang back.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I don't think I have ever had to cancel anything so as a result, I haven't had any nightmares. I guess many of you cannot relate to that. I am sure its only a matter of time when I will have a nightmare of cancelling....

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?